The 23-year-old German photographer Valentin Goppel began making photographs of his bubble of flatmates in Hanover at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020. The project, documenting the disorienting feel of “life in the time of corona” was a way to pass the time and a psychological necessity. Goppel and his friends were at that in-between age of transition into adulthood when the virus put a hold on their lives. University was closed, there was nowhere to gather inside, and they retreated to the shapeless world of online learning and outdoor meeting. His book Zwischen den Jahren (“Between the years”) – is a record of that unmooring.
This picture, of friends together and not together, their faces lit by phone screens, expresses the dislocated mood. The blank wall on the edge of the scrubby parkland has the aimless and furtive character of many of Goppel’s pictures as restrictions shifted and anxiety undid purpose: why here? And what happens next?
