When 2020 dawned, Reed Schick was doing well. He had been working fulltime as a freelance photographer ever since graduating from Covenant College in 2019, making portraits and doing photoshoots for brands and bands in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Schick loved the work, and business was good.

Then the pandemic struck.

On March 5, the first case of COVID-19 was reported in Tennessee. Within a month, the state’s official numbers had skyrocketed to nearly 3,000 confirmed cases; by early May, more than 12,000. Across the country, “social distancing” and stay-at-home orders were put in place, businesses shut their doors and people locked themselves away in their apartments and houses in a concerted effort to “flatten the curve.” Millions have lost their jobs as a result of the lockdowns, and professional creatives like Schick are no exception.

“All my jobs [for March and April] were cancelled,” he said. “There was a period for about a month and a half where I wasn’t doing anything.”

Anxious, unemployed, and fearful of an uncertain future, Schick didn’t know what to do. Other photographers were finding ways to make photos—smiling, happy faces amidst the global pandemic. But to Schick, they all seemed staged, inauthentic to how people were really feeling in an unprecedented cultural moment.

Then he noticed other images emerging from around the world—photos of people sitting on their porches or looking out from inside their houses, portraits that matched the isolation and uncertainty he was experiencing. He remembered a photo series called “Dear Stranger” created by Japanese photographer Shizuka Yokomizo in the late ‘90s. For the project, Yokomizo mailed anonymous letters to residents of apartments in cities around the world, asking them to stand in front of their windows at a particular date and time so that, with their permission, she could photograph them from outside. Photographer and subject remained anonymous to one another for the entire exchange—strangers, yet collaborators making a portrait together. The resulting images are intimate and fascinating.

The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare the fragility of our society, our economy, and our bodies, and Schick’s photos show us the raw, hard truth. We are scared and lonely.

Inspired, Schick set up a session to photograph his neighbor through her window, “just to see what happens.” And something clicked.

“As I was making those photographs, it all hit me at once,” Schick said. “I [realized,] I need to photograph everyone in my neighborhood.”

There Is Beauty Yet

St. Elmo, Schick’s neighborhood, rests just at the bottom of Lookout Mountain, Tennessee. Its northernmost blocks boast a scattering of local restaurants, shops, and the Incline Railway, a passenger car that carries tourists to the top of the mountain. To the south lies the Georgia border, and the end of Chattanooga proper. In the space between, sheltering-in-place in hundred-year-old homes and ramshackle apartments, isolated behind walls of brick and mountain stone and loneliness, live nearly 3,000 people—each with a unique story, each carrying their own anxieties and joys, hopes and fears.

Schick began with the dozen or so neighbors he already knew well. He called and explained his idea—a series of portraits of St. Elmo residents at home during the pandemic—and asked if he could photograph them through a window, shooting from outside their house looking in.

Careful to maintain social distancing and avoid being intrusive, he used a telephoto lens and worked out ahead of time how close he would come to people’s houses.

“[I told them,] ‘I will stay on your yard or on the sidewalk or wherever you feel comfortable with me,’” he said. “Sometimes people come out on their porch and we talk a little bit at a safe distance if they’re curious about the project or want to get more of an idea of what’s expected, [but] it’s very non-contact.”

When someone agreed to participate in the project, Shick arranged a time, showed up, shot for five to 10 minutes, and left. For every person he photographed, Schick asked that they share the project with one of their neighbors. Organically, neighbor by neighbor, the project began to grow.

“As far as a prompt, … I don’t tell anyone what to do,” Schick said. “If people ask, ‘Should I smile?’ I just say, ‘I want you to try and push into how you’ve been feeling over the past few weeks and express that the best way that you can.”

And they did.

A family crowds close to fit their window’s frame. The children grin and press their hands to the glass in a wave at the unseen photographer, and their mother smiles with them in their joy. Behind them, a father’s weary face emerges, partially obscured by the play of light and shadow.

A man with friendly eyes and an easy grin leans with his elbow casually resting on the back of a chair. Outside, just beyond the glass, a window box explodes with flowers.

An elderly woman peeks through an ornate whirl of metal leaves encircling her front door. Below, her fingers curl through figure eights of steely vines.

The windows that stand between the viewer and each photo’s subject could easily have been a barrier—obscuring what could otherwise be decent portraits. Instead, they provide a natural frame and allow Schick to exercise his creativity.

In one portrait, a young woman stands before a large window, staring sadly into the outside world. Around and above her head the glass reflects a storm of leaves, a ghostly halo of hovering red. In another, window grills marred by peeling paint cast shadows like prison bars across the subject’s face.

The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare the fragility of our society, our economy, and our bodies, and Schick’s photos show us the raw, hard truth. We are scared and lonely. We are worried and stretched thin.

“Families [will tell me]: ‘When our kids grow up we’re going to show them these photos.’ There’s something really special about that.”

But they show another truth as well — the fleeting glimpses of grace and beauty that remain in the midst of chaos and uncertainty: a father’s kiss on his daughter’s forehead, the lines etched in an ancient face by decades of laughter, the joys of family. The photos tell us, quietly: the days are dark, but there is beauty yet.

Together

For Schick, photography functions as an expression of his faith. The way he sees it, when he seeks out beauty in God’s world, captures authentic moments with viewfinder and lens, and shares the images he makes with others, he’s doing exactly what God made him to do.

“One hundred percent of everything I do [as a photographer] is an outflow of my relationship with Jesus,” he explained.

People have always been central to Schick’s photography—and the conversations that happen and relationships that inevitably form over the course of a photoshoot are as important to him as the images themselves. It’s this Christ-driven love for people and community that brought him to make this project in the first place.

“I want to give people something they can be happy about,” Schick added. “And I want to give people something they can remember this time from,” he added. “Families [will tell me]: ‘When our kids grow up we’re going to show them these photos.’ There’s something really special about that. Some people that I photographed live alone, and they said that this was the first thing they had had to look forward to in a long time. I love that it was something fun for them.”

Art can bring hope in times like these, and the community is beginning to take notice. The local TV news highlighted Schick’s photography, and in late April, he was commissioned by a local non-profit to do a similar photo project in another Chattanooga neighborhood. Things are looking up.

As of the time this article was written, Schick had made photographs of over 87 households in St. Elmo. He stills hopes to photograph everyone in the neighborhood, but for the near term, he’s aiming to reach 100 portraits.

“[A year from now,] I’d love to have a show at a local studio in St. Elmo,” Schick said. “Print out a ton of the photos and invite everyone in the neighborhood. … I think it would be really powerful to be in person with everyone all in the same room, looking at all these photos from a year ago and having space to reflect [together].”

“Together” is really the only way to view the series properly.

Individually, Schick’s St. Elmo portraits are beautiful—vivid, raw depictions of human emotion in a time of crisis and isolation. Viewed together, they become something more—a mosaic of one community’s pain and joy, loneliness and togetherness, fear and hope. Uncertain of what tomorrow may bring, these neighbors hold tight to coffee cups and cats and stuffed foxes and each another. They are us—and that’s exactly what makes them compelling. 

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Andrew Shaughnessy, a graduate of Covenant College, is a freelance writer based in Portland, Oregon.