Thriving in Place: Neo Serafimidis - The Sheltering Night #19

18 x 24", digital print

Artist Statement

On March 16, Bay Area counties issued "shelter in place" orders. My days were suddenly long and busy, working frantically to get my 60 coworkers set up and working remotely. After two weeks of rarely setting foot outside, the need to escape, to get some exercise, and to make photographs, led to long walks at night with my camera and tripod, a time when the streets were eerily empty of cars and pedestrians.

During these walks, I would sometimes talk or text with friends, and sometimes walk by their homes, I eventually began experimenting with photographing people inside their homes, peering out into the darkness. The results were immediately striking to me and grew into this series of portraits of friends, acquaintances, and strangers that explores the range of feelings and reactions we all had to the pandemic in the first few frightening months

Artist Bio

Neo Serafimidis is a photographer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Much of his recent work is documentary and street photography focused on recognizably old artifacts from automobiles to ephemera and comprises an exploration of memory, nostalgia, and feelings of personal loss. He is also a composer of electronic music and has written scores for theater, modern dance, and multimedia. Neo attended graduate school at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he received a PhD in philosophy. Neo took up photography in earnest after moving to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2001.