“Before the quarantine started I had been travelling for a while, around people 24/7,” photographer Ottilie Landmark says. “Not to mention, I had been in Italy, so on returning to London I went straight into self-isolation.” Originally from Denmark, but based in London, Ottilie is used to working from home and happy to spend periods of time alone, so it wasn’t the isolation that bothered her initially. “What I feared most was the thought of how this lockdown would affect me and Sinéad, my wife,” she says, “if we were going to be together all the time in a shared house with other roommates.”
But like many other artists right now, Ottilie has found an unexpected freedom in the confides of the lockdown. “It enables me to be more spontaneous and seize the moment to photograph when I felt the moment and setting was perfect. It’s been a good lesson to sometimes just ‘do’ stuff instead of overthinking it,” she says. It’s also allowed her to experiment with different techniques. “I have been using the quarantine time to do lots of small technical tests that I have been wanting to try out. I like to use both natural and artificial light in combination. Being at home all the time made me super familiar with the cycle of light in the house so I knew how to use it to my advantage.”
She’s also no longer reliant on getting her film developed in shops. “Instead of waiting until lockdown ended, I decided that this was the moment I was going to learn to process colour film at home,” she says. “Figuring out this developing technique has made me more self-sufficient and it felt satisfying to be in control of the procedure from beginning to end.”
Credits
All images courtesy Ottilie Landmark