Karen recalls her horrific and despairing time working at Pelham Care Home in Folkestone where they lost 10 residents over Lockdown 2020.

"We had no testing kits or anything for a long while. Then we had a special team came in, did some testing, and we found out that 90 percent of our residents were, in fact probably 95 percent of our residents were positive and over half of the staff, so that was quite horrific and from there everything just fell apart.

We lost over half our residents with four or five staff working every day, 24 hours, that's just four or five staff. We were doing the cooking, the domestic work, the caring, everything, absolutely everything." - Karen.


Lockdown Stories 2020 - under the first lockdown in the spring of 2020 I created a series of 150 portraits, that depicted a selection of essential workers and residents mainly confined indoors in and around Folkestone, Kent.

You can view a selection of portraits from this project on this link: https://zakwaters.com/Lockdown (Best viewed from a computer.)

These audio recordings are an ongoing documentation of the residents and workers I photographed. In 2022, I asked them to reflect on their own lockdown 2020 experiences and tell me their story.

Thank you to Develop Your Creative Practice (DYCP) and The Arts Council England for supporting this project.
The Arts Council: https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/
DYCP: https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/dycp

All Rights Reserved Zak Waters: https://zakwaters.com/ (Best viewed from a computer.)

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/zakrwaters/
X: https://twitter.com/ZakWaters
X: https://twitter.com/Camerasnaps​


Equipment: Tascam Portacapture
Rode NTG4 Microphone
PG2 pistol grip and shock mount

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