MAP6 photographers Richard Chivers, Rich Cutler, Barry Falk, Raoul Ries and Paul Walsh visited Rovaniemi in Lapland last week, coincidentally during the major outbreak of the coronavirus. Upon arrival, like many others, we were left stranded without a flight home as the situation deteriorated and the city closed down around us. Most of the meetings we had arranged there were cancelled, so for the most part we were unable to continue our individual projects. In light of this we decided to make a group collaborative project about our experience during this time. As we waited for our rescheduled flight home we spent time documenting the town and meeting local inhabitants, and also visiting tourists who like us were in the precarious position of waiting for flights home as the borders closed.
Richard Chivers was photographing around the south-west part the city in the industrial sector, continuing to document the timber industry for his series Green Gold. Aside from this, he made a series of architectural studies of the city both during the day and at night.
Barry Falk made a number of trips out of the city to local communities and townships, where he photographed those who lived there and tourists who were stranded due to the coronavirus outbreak.
Rich Cutler worked primarily alone in the forests that surround Rovaniemi, capturing intimate still life's in the landscape, as a continuation of the work he made during his previous trip to Helsinki. During the night he went out to capture the darkness as it descended on the city.
Raoul Ries continued his photographic study of social space with a series of street portraits taken throughout Rovaniemi. After sunset he captured empty retail centres and malls in a series of colour architectural night studies.
Over the next few weeks we will start to share some of the images we made in Rovaniemi as we continue to edit the work. The coronavirus outbreak presented us with many problems as photographers, and made us question if we should in fact be making photographs at all during such a challenging time. However, creating work became cathartic and helped us to deal with the uncertainty of our circumstances and the precariousness of being stranded far from family and friends. We were also mindful of social distance and minimising human contact to avoid potentially spreading the virus.