L**k down / up Editorial
In March 2020, Zurich started a campaign, saying: “Stay home. Please. All.” The noise of the traffic stopped. Birds sang louder than before. Everyone had time. The extraordinary situation brought forward the ordinary life. This had never happened before. And yet it felt strangely familiar. The outside space appeared like a large interior space. The interior space, on the other hand, looked like a microcosm. As adults we saw things with the eyes of children. The camera captured the change of colors, spaces, and surfaces more accurately than concepts could. The camera was not looking for the clichés that filled the news – empty trains, empty tourist destinations, closed shops. Rather it registered the signs of change: Ornaments that children had drawn on the asphalt, happy dogs that were led outside five times a day, conversations with neighbors over the balcony, layers of golden pollen and petals on the roofs of unwashed cars, the exhaust of a lonely plane high in the sky. In retrospect, the photographs help us to perceive what we didn’t hear in the news, namely the productive side of the lockdown. People started to take care of each other, paying attention, focusing. Conversations were more profound than before, phone calls were longer. The vision became clearer, more focused. There was something precious in this long spring.