Lockdown in pictures: pandemic inspires young people to get behind lens

From ‘beach holidays’ in the living room to neon-lit workouts at home, young people in the UK have documented the quiet eccentricities of life locked up as part of a national photo contest.

Blockade: take a positive view It was launched by Positive View, a charity running photography-based empowerment programs for young people in some of the UK’s most deprived neighborhoods.

“The idea is to support young people who live on the haciendas, who dropped out of school and become involved in gangs and drugs,” explained Andrew Page, founder of the foundation. “The courses give them positive skills, self-confidence, all those things that will help them in learning and employment.”

However, with the coronavirus crisis forcing the foundation’s face-to-face projects to be temporarily shut down, Positive View launched a nationwide online photography contest after receiving anxious phone calls from participants, who could no longer participate in its program. .

“We got so many calls from young people asking if there was anything else they could do,” Page told Positive News. “This is how this project happened, it was very much his idea.”

The winner of the competition was Alma Rosaz, 25, who took home £ 1,000 for Dreaming of the Beach (main image, above). The image shows her and her partner leaning out of the window of their London flat dressed for a sunny day by the sea.

Second place and £ 500 went to Felix Zeigler, who also lives in London, for 2 Meters Apart, a photo of Barbies lined up in someone’s window, which he took while walking through Paddington.

“In fact, I really enjoyed the confinement, as I went through two quite difficult years before and ended up dropping out of school,” said the 19-year-old. “With everyone around me moving forward, I found the lockdown was a catch-up time while the world was on hiatus.”

Third place and £ 250 went to Surrey-based Flo Hendriks for Florentine’s Quarantine, which shows her lying in the middle of a bath and cans of baked beans, a tongue-in-cheek reference to panic buying.

“[Panic buying] It made me question the intelligence of humanity, but so did we, ”said the 18-year-old, who wants to continue studying photography at university and as a career.

Entries for the next Lockdown: Taking a Positive View photo contest open in May. There’s also a local competition for youth ages 11-25 in Westminster, which was released yesterday.

Encouraged by the success of its nationwide photography contest, Positive View will launch the UK’s first annual youth photography awards later this year.

However, despite the success of the competition, Page is eager for the lockdown to end so the charity can get back to running its face-to-face photography programs. “They are changing lives,” he says.

Lock Photo Gallery

Here are some other photos that caught the judges’ attention among the 3,500 entries.