Ottie's Picture Book
Girl Museum (London)
"People called it a lockdown? Were we really locked-in, though?! Eat, sleep, repeat. We stayed home. We did nothing but stay home and eat, sleep and repeat and watch videos. My memories from that year are good. Mostly good. Good, good, good. Homeschool! And that time makes me think of breakfast. Because I remember a lot of eating breakfast.” – Ottie
These photographs by Ottie, now age 10, are from the 2024 art book co-authored with her parents, American photographers Benjamin Donaldson and Lisa Kereszi, and is titled, IN, published by Roman Nvmerals in New York. The images in the collaborative book were made by parents and their child in and around their home from early 2020 through the end of 2021, the most locked-down period of the pandemic. Ottie turned 6 towards the beginning of this period, and then turned 7 towards the end. The father made pictures that are staged, magical and strange; the child made pictures of her life – dolls, toys, the blurry world outside, and her screens; the mother, of food and flowers, and arranged them to reflect the passing of seasons. The pictures by the trio were all tossed together, and it becomes unclear whose pictures are whose, which adds to the sense of displacement, which reflects the collective experience of that Groundhog Day-like year.
Ottie took hundreds of photographs over that year. Here are some of her pictures, which she titled “Ottie’s Picture Book,” pulled out from the collective description of that year. Time and space melts from one picture to the next, and there is a feeling of the family being the only people in the world, on an island, away from what they feared might harm them.
Ottie’s photographs were selected for a special exhibition at Girl Museum, the first museum in the world dedicated to celebrating girlhood. A key part of Girl Museum’s mission is to advocate for girls’ voices to be heard. Her work speaks to one girl’s experiences of the pandemic, and while they are deeply personal, they are also universal. We wanted to show others that they were not alone and to encourage creativity, especially through photography, as a way of expressing their voices and dealing with times of crises.
See the entire exhibition at Girl Museum (www.girlmuseum.org).
