Visual Studies

ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rvst20

Smudged windows: scenes from home during a

pandemic

Brent Luvaas

To cite this article: Brent Luvaas (2021) Smudged windows: scenes from home during a
pandemic, Visual Studies, 36:2, 85-105, DOI: 10.1080/1472586X.2021.1914152

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1472586X.2021.1914152

Published online: 24 May 2021.

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Visual Studies, 2021
Vol. 36, No. 2, 85–105, https://doi.org/10.1080/1472586X.2021.1914152

VISUAL ESSAY

Smudged windows: scenes from home during a pandemic

BRENT LUVAAS

During the Coronavirus lockdown of 2020, the space of home for many of us expanded considerably, from a place of
refuge and rest, to the primary location of nearly every event in our lives. This photo essay documents the lived, and felt,
experience of life at home in suburban Philadelphia during lockdown. Shot through smudged and hazy windows and
depicting ambiguous scenes that are often difficult to identify or figure out, it seeks to document both the alien eeriness of
pandemic life and the utter mundanity of being stuck at home for months at a time. The accompanying text adds further
emotional complexity to the visual narrative without simplifying or explaining the images. The images and the text are
meant to sit alongside one another, complicating and sometimes contradicting each other, and presenting aspects of the
experience that the other is ill-equipped to capture. My hope is that this essay reveals something of the emotional
complexity of lockdown, its irreducibility and singularity, its fraught affective atmosphere not easily represented in either
images or words.

Brent Luvaas is Associate Professor of Global Studies at Drexel University. A visual anthropologist, his work explores how digital technologies shape the way
we see and experience the world around us. He is the author of Street Style: An Ethnography of Fashion Blogging (Bloomsbury 2016) and DIY Style: Fashion,
Music, and Global Digital Cultures (Berg 2012). His book Street Style is the 2019 winner of the John Collier Jr. Award for Still Photography.

© 2021 International Visual Sociology Association

86 B. Luvaas

Once it was no longer safe to go out on the streets to shoot, I started looking inward, literally, pointing my lens through
the windows of our house and documenting my family’s life in lockdown, as if I were an outsider looking in.

It wasn’t hard. The pandemic had shifted the rhythms and routines of our lives so profoundly, they had already become
foreign.
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In the early days, we did a lot of baking. Distraction baking. Cookies. Brownies. Cinnamon rolls smothered in cream
cheese frosting.

And cleaning. Messes we’d let sit idle for years. We started with the drawers. Then the kitchen cupboards. The
makeshift shelves in the mudroom.

We imagined the virus sticking to our clothes, our hair, our skin, hanging from the doorways in strings of droplets like
a beaded curtain. We could never quite take enough showers to feel clean, never quite get the laundry water hot
enough. We wiped our doorknobs with vinegar and bleach, left our packages on the sunporch to disinfect under UV.

It was mid-March then. This was still only supposed to last a couple of weeks.
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It was late March when the college bros across the tracks from us began to go stir-crazy. Louder ‘woos!’. Fuller-
throated ‘yeahs’! Bare-chested, beer-fuelled yelps.

One night, as I took out the recycling, I saw one of them squatting on the highspeed rail tracks, smug grin on his face
as if he’d accomplished something. At first, I thought he might be an employee of SEPTA, the local transportation
authority. No one else goes on the tracks. Then, I saw his housemate, shirt off, athletic shorts creeping up his thighs,
jogging back and forth behind him. He did a few laps between a ditch and a mud puddle, pumped his fists in the air.
One of them was curled around a can of Natty Light.

‘Wooooo!’ he yelled. ‘Yeah!’ said the first bro in response.

They had reduced conversation to the lowest common denominator of sound.

I tried not to look at them.

I went inside to tell my family what I’d seen. My daughter, Esme, took her position at the bedroom window and
narrated events. Her mother, Jess, perched on the bed listening.

‘Now one of them is gone,’ said Esme. ‘I think they’re going inside. No. No. They’re still out there. They’re doing high
fives.’

We heard the rattle of the train building in the distance. The bros stayed where they were.

‘They’re waving at the train,’ said Esme. ‘They’re racing beside it!’

There were only a few remaining passengers on the train, mostly Black and Brown, newly dubbed ‘essential workers’ on
their way to hospitals and warehouses. Unlike the bros – or us – they had somewhere they had to be. ‘Hiiii!’ called one
of the bros to them in a sing-song voice.

‘Should I call the cops?’ I asked Jess.

‘I think this is the kind of situation where you call the cops,’ she said. ‘It’s not safe.’ I called the cops. The dispatcher asked me
to describe the guys on the tracks. I did.

‘No. No,’ he said. ‘What do they look like? Are they Black? Hispanic?’

Ah, I thought, so that’s what you’re asking. ‘White,’ I said flatly. As if there were any other conclusion anyone could
reach.

‘Ok,’ he told me, not an ounce of urgency in his voice, ‘I’ll let the police know.’

The police came, briefly, talked to the bros, and left. I felt unsatisfied. It’s not that I wanted the bros to go to jail, or be
slammed onto the gravel face down, thrown up against the side of a police car in cuffs. Like those are the kinds of
things that happens to white college bros anyway. The worst thing most of them have to face in all of this is boredom.I
just wanted to stop hearing the ‘woooos!’ for a few days. The walls were tight enough around us already.
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As home began to feel smaller, its relative place in our lives expanded. It became our office, our workspace, our lecture
hall, our gym. It was a laundromat, an art studio, a rec centre, a decontamination zone. A containment cell.

I started ‘remote teaching’ after Spring break. Then Esme started ‘remote learning.’ Jess, who, for the past few years had
been crocheting street installations on city fences and teaching art to vulnerable populations, many without regular
access to the Internet, couldn’t remote anything. She began building space invaders out of granny squares on our
bedroom floor.

But by late summer, Jess had resumed teaching too. She took the downstairs kitchen table. Esme claimed the whole
middle floor. You could hear the voices of teachers reverberating throughout the house. I had to retreat to the attic to
get any work done, and then, I mostly just messed around, scrolled through social media, tinkered with half-written
articles. Sometimes I’d hear Esme’s maths teacher, admonishing some kid, stiff and inattentive after six continuous
hours on Zoom, as a message directly to me: ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ she’d say. ‘You’re not paying attention
at all. I have to say I’m disappointed in you.’

I began shooting pictures from the inside out, our windows marking the boundaries of a near-infinite interiority.
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We are good pandemic citizens. We wear masks when we are around other people. We cross the street when
pedestrians approach us. We only socialise within the limits of our household. But where exactly we draw those limits –
how exactly we separate ‘interior’ from ‘exterior’ – has some room for negotiation. We create our own bubbles.
Sometimes we also pop them.

The neighbour boys are in our bubble. Of course, they are. The fence between our houses has a loose plank the kids use
as a door.

But the kids have been practicing something like social distancing between them anyway. It’s inconsistent. It can last
for hours or weeks. Esme is two years older than the oldest neighbour boy. There’s been a gradual pulling away for
years now.

The pandemic has slowed it but not stopped it.

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We are more and more acutely aware that our home is not just our own. Wine berries twist up our fence. Spider plants
web across our windows. Wasps nest above our front door. Ants, mice, rabbits, and rats scurry under the gap between
our sunporch and its foundation.

There is some strange comfort in this. As if, locked out of the rest of the world, the world has come home to us.
Another loose plank in our fence. Another perforation in our exoskeleton. The outside brought in.

We spend much more time than we usually would tending to that world. We water. We weed. We reread books of
poetry gathering dust on our shelves.

We are the memes of liberal elites people make fun of in their Twitter feeds.
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But not all visitors are welcome.

Jess has declared war on the spotted lantern flies. They have been eating our walnut trees, clustering in spirals around
the grape vines on our back patio. Jess and Esme whack them with plastic water bottles, capture them in jars of vinegar.

We can’t kill the virus, but the lantern flies have been more accommodating. You can take out hundreds in a single,
rage-fuelled session. I squish them beneath my sandals on my afternoon walks. Our neighbours wrap their trees in duct
tape, sticky side out.

When the newspapers write about the lantern flies, they sound a little like Trump on a stump speech. The lantern flies
are from China. Invaders from China. China bugs in our backyard.
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One of the most notable things about lockdown is how little there is to note about it. It has been happening. It will keep
on happening. ‘It is what it is,’ said Trump, of the growing fatalities a few months back. It’s a cruel sentiment, but still,
one of the few true things he’s said.

Weekly phone calls with parents are full of long, awkward pauses. We have nothing new to report, no new insights to
offer. This week, we mowed the lawn. We went for a grocery run. Our kitten – a pandemic rescue – miaowed outside
our bedroom door twice per day, once, as we went to bed at 11pm, and the other, shortly before we got up at 6:25.
These are not events. They are the doodles you draw around events on your calendar.

But my mom is hoping to set up another Zoom family gathering anyway. Another chance to stare at ourselves in those
little mirrored rectangles. It’s not just that video conferencing is a poor substitute for getting together in physical space.
It’s also that it renders our relationships as more tasks to fulfill. Family requirements now met, I have reached intimacy
inbox zero.
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As the pandemic has dragged on, time has accelerated. The first couple of weeks lasted years. The last few months have
gone by in days.

And we have let some of our routines slip. We bleach less often. We take packages indoors right away. Sometimes we
wash our hands for only half a chorus of ‘Happy Birthday.’

And we have stopped fixing every little thing as it breaks down, the kitchen door, the slats around the mudroom
window. Some things we just let sit.

For example, before the lockdown, I was worried about ‘screen time.’ I had been moving away from social media,
leaving my phone at home when I didn’t need it. I even imposed a rule on myself to only check email once a day.
I can’t do that anymore. Half my job is email. Screen time is the only kind of time there is.
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Someday I might be nostalgic for this. Not the daily death tolls. Not the low hum of anxiety. Not the steady drip of
news, the expectation that something else, something worse, is just about to happen. But the slowness. The languor.
The feeling that nothing we do really matters that much.

Years back, for weeks before I would go on a fieldwork expedition, I would feel like I was about to step into a void.
I couldn’t imagine my life once the trip began. I couldn’t plan for a life after. The future was a solid, opaque wall.

That’s how I feel lately too. There will be a future beyond this pandemic, but I can no longer easily imagine it. Even the
life I’m living today maintains a certain stubborn blurriness. I can’t quite focus. I can’t make out the details.

I use photography to open windows in that wall. Sometimes, I can almost see through them.
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DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.