During the fall of 2020, I was left with a collection of images from a time that now seems hazy: summer isolation, a confusing period when the life I knew had been flipped upside down. The previous spring, my father, recently separated from my mother, had moved back in. We left the city and spent six months during the Covid pandemic squeezed together as a family once again in my grandfather’s house upstate. It was a time when my love of photography alone could not sustain me.
The aftermath of isolation surrounded me. Photographs of our garden and picnics and self portraits that I took in my bathroom—so much documentation, yet the memory of summer was vague. I needed to do something to crystallize this time, so I made a book with images of quarantine and my diary entries from those distant months. I wanted to combine my newfound fascination with sewing with my longtime love of photography. I got to work, cutting and sewing pages together, stitch after stitch. Now I am left with a physical object that I can pass around and share and photograph. I’m able to reconnect with that segment of the past, no matter how uncomfortable. I will never forget.
Saskia Lethin is an 18-year-old photographer living in New York City. Generally working with color film, her photos capture a variety of subjects—her city, her family, her friends, and her surroundings. Carrying her camera with her wherever she goes, she’s able to capture beautiful and coincidentally arranged moments on a whim. Her photo, “Waiting for the Guests to Arrive,” won a Silver Medal nationally in the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards of 2021, and was shown in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She has studied at the Oxbow School, the International Center of Photography, and The New School. A graduating senior at the Fieldston School, she looks forward to continuing her practice at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she will be majoring in photography.
The aftermath of isolation surrounded me. Photographs of our garden and picnics and self portraits that I took in my bathroom—so much documentation, yet the memory of summer was vague. I needed to do something to crystallize this time, so I made a book with images of quarantine and my diary entries from those distant months. I wanted to combine my newfound fascination with sewing with my longtime love of photography. I got to work, cutting and sewing pages together, stitch after stitch. Now I am left with a physical object that I can pass around and share and photograph. I’m able to reconnect with that segment of the past, no matter how uncomfortable. I will never forget.