For everything there is a season, a verse from the bible meaning, there is a right time for everything. You are not defined by what is happening around you, these circumstances may change and condition you, but regardless, you are growing. After living in Greece the first few months of the pandemic I decided that this spring I wanted to capture places of worship that are for many Greeks, spaces of community and hope. I moved to the Island of Paros March 3rd. My quality of life in that spring was of a completely different nature compared to my friends and family at home. Time was constructing a new reality and death became a constant part of everyone's lives as we were soon surrounded by it. My new place to live reflected the fact that I was not experiencing this pandemic the same way I would have had I been in a context that I was familiar with. Instead, I was in the middle of a dense emotional experience while the world was going through its own. When I returned from Greece, everything slowed down instantaneously. Not only was I entering a world very different from the one I left, but I was returning to a new season and new way of living. I returned home on July 4th. In the first months of being home, three people I knew committed suicide. Another death in November from alcoholism. In December my family was hit the hardest with the loss of my great aunt who, after entering a nursing home in October, caught COVID-19 and passed away days before Christmas. We said goodbye to her for the last time through a facetime call on my father’s phone. She lay there lifeless, and blue hooked up to ventilators with a nurse holding a camera to her face, unresponsive and unrecognizable.

From my loss I wanted to try and see if I could capture strength within communal grief. My idea for this project was to look at places of worship during the pandemic. I wanted my pictures to be darker with an emphasis on the light. It was important for each photograph to have a meaning and to tie seamlessly into one another. My idea was for the pictures to ask questions without giving answers. What do these spaces mean now? How have they adopted during the pandemic? What does grief look like? The world was, and still is going through this collective grieving. This emotion is not only phycological but physical. We are just starting to emerge from a state of confinement and fear. While there's a great joy in finally being free and able to see loved ones, what follows is an era of grieving the life we knew, the people we lost, and the changed world that we are stepping foot into. Grief is not linear; it is processed in stages. Everyone lost someone or something during this time, so how do we begin again? What are the next steps through our grief? Throughout the pandemic there were moments of great fear, but like these spaces I thought it was important to see the hope. With all loss and change comes a new potential. Fear is replaced by weariness, but the color is beginning to return one's cheeks.