Sweet Monster - Halloween in the Time of Covid  - 19

Once a year in Johannesburg folks from suburbia emerge from behind their walled gardens and don Chinese -made, American horror movie inspired costumes and open their houses to strangers. In 2019 I went to a Halloween party in a local park.  I thought that the crowd seemed on edge and in hindsight it turned out to be a grim portent of things to come. In March 2020 masked members of the South African Defence Force barreled zombie -like through city streets, brutally enforcing extreme Covid-19 protection rules, people reeled from the isolation and communities starved of income began to fray around the edges. Some parts of the city began to look like scenes from the American science fiction movie, 'Escape from New York.' The sweet promise of 2020 melted into pools of sadness and loss. When Halloween came round in 2020, children and  their minders slunk around deserted streets looking for connection.  The weeping brown lesions of a London plane tree infected with the Polyphagous shothole borer mirrored a child's paint stained tunic, donned in hope of finding friends to trick or treat with in amongst the shuttered houses. 2020 was a year of contemplating all things alien and apocalyptic, a monstrous year. Racing home from a street gathering before curfew, I crossed paths with a green monster.  Captivated by the sheen of a sodium street light on his skin, I asked for a portrait, but he shook its head, offering instead a sweet before jumping into a car and speeding off. So I photographed a monster handing out a sweet. Maybe it was a token of hope. As the sun went down on 2020, a collective longing for space, freedom and the simple joys of childhood. If 2020 was a monstrous year then 2021 was bittersweet, reckoning with a myriad of ghastly losses while celebrating a return to normal life. Families dropped their masks and wandered the streets with a stain of sadness, the ghost of lost childhoods lingering over the crowds of squealing kids squeezing every last drop of pleasure out friendships and sugar fixes. Their parents walking behind, hiding a dread of a fourth Covid wave, ushering their children up the street.

NOTE: These are large thumbnails  -  click on individual pictures for captions.