Aestus | a photo book about Covid

One year.
A year that feels like a decade. A year of resignification of life and inconstancy of the soul. A year of being
an eyewitness to history.
This sequence of images is a profound attempt to express indecipherable feelings. The photograph in its
pure state. A pair of photographers, or rather, friends on a dialectical journey, and of endless questions
that have the intention of achieving their own liberation. It is by sharing perspectives that the other is
understood, until that other is part of the self and that self reaches a higher stage. Transformation and
subjectivity. A much more complex dimension than our existent dualisms.
Immerse yourself in these 3 chapters, or better, 3 stages, from pandemic state of emergency overseas, to
the uncertainty if we would all get home, to a self-isolation in quarantine. Feel the search for a reality with
differentiating potential. Here we are all on a plane of immanence cutting out chaos.
Until one day,

Leonardo

​

***

The world has changed. We have changed.
It began with a sudden and total shutdown of society, a panicked state of emergency unseen for
generations. Two friends, photographers, stranded on a foreign continent, marooned on a desert island in
an urban archipelago. Anxiously clicking away on laptops, making heated phone calls, chain-smoking
cigarettes, staring down at ghostly streets, wondering, waiting.
Flying west across the ocean, back in time, to lands yet to grapple with the ravages of a soon-to-be global
plague. Quarantined, experiencing the trauma anew, shuttered away in homes that no longer felt familiar
as the world convulsed through stages of calamity.
The weight of living through history firsthand, isolated and alone, led to sharing a diary of photographs as
a way to interpret for ourselves, and help each other comprehend, the shifting ground under our feet.
Angling in the depths of our psyche, trying to construe meaning from events happening quicker than we
could process them. Caught in a swift, rushing river helpless to the sweeping pull of the current.
This series of images is the product of a struggle to stay emotionally afloat in a psychological quicksand,
transforming the daily mundane into a bizarre parallel universe characterized by fear, boredom,

frustration, and paranoia. A collaborative attempt at maintaining control and making sense of an alien
reality. A reality in which we have yet to understand all that we have lost, and all that we have gained; the
true gravity of the longest year in history.
Solidarity,
Trey