We Saw You — a new video series hosted by yours truly — debuts today. For the series, I’ll be visiting interesting Memphians and Mid-Southerners in their homes. Viewers will get to see where and how these people live, as well as their workplaces and, at times, their favorite haunts.
The series begins with a visit with Jamie Harmon, the man in the cap most people know as the owner/operator of the Amurica Photo booths. These are the little trailers stocked with mannequins and all sorts of bizarre props that he brings to parties and other events.
Harmon also is known for his Memphis Quarantine photo book, compiled from a series of portraits he shot during the pandemic. He took photos of people, most of them behind the windows of their homes, peering into the new normal, as they sheltered in place.
For this interview, Harmon and I sat on the front porch of his Midtown home over a not-yet-completed jigsaw puzzle as a giant ice cream cone hovered over us.
We then walked through the house, eclectically furnished with art and other possessions. He tells me at one point about an interesting collection — fingernails and toenails in jars.
A trip to his office in Crosstown Concourse was next. This is where he let me know about the postcards with unusual photos he sends friends without letting them know he’s the sender.
Harmon’s life is as interesting as his Amurica rolling photo booths. Check it out.
“The Memphis Quarantine Project started on March 13, 2020,” writes photographer Jamie Harmon in the opening lines of his new book, Memphis Quarantine (Amurica), and noting the date only heightens the new volume’s sense of time travel. By that Friday the 13th, the World Health Organization had declared Covid-19 a pandemic and area schools were transitioning to remote learning or extra time off. With the city’s official lockdown more than a week away, most of us were already radically rethinking our routines — and at that point, many feared contagion from just touching groceries. There was but one suggestion of increased safety: the great outdoors.
And so Harmon hit the streets. “I asked a friend if I could photograph them from outside their home,” he writes. “This led to posting an open invitation on social media and the project quickly grew to over 1,200 dwellings.” Luckily for Memphis and the world, Harmon is a photographer with a keen eye for flashes of character in the moment; his bio says he’s a visual anthropologist, and that’s closer to what he does with a camera. With it, he casts a wide net to capture the culture of Memphis in all its diversity: a multitude of porches, windows, apartments, garages, pets, and various states of parenthood reveal themselves from more or less the same zone — between the inside and the outside.
From only a few yards away or through double-paned glass, the distance is always there, looming in every image. A family crouching on a screened-in porch; young housemates gathered with their instruments just inside the door; a couple represented by two heads framed in separate windows; someone playing a guitar solo in green graduation robes; a porch-sitter obscured by the Memphis Flyer she’s reading, her dog alert. Yet all of them also feature another silent subject: the distance itself.
In each shot, Harmon puts himself into what anthropologists call liminal space, a realm betwixt and between different states of being. The photographer keeps his pandemically correct distance, yet simultaneously peers across it, illuminating those interior safe spaces to which we all retreated. Harmon occasionally keeps his spot flash in the frame, throwing light from just outside the window into the spaces where humans live. These pictures capture both how people defined a safe distance in those dark days, and how they defined the interior space of their bubble.
As Harmon was taking images and posting them on social media, just glimpsing them in a scroll was somehow hopeful, albeit ephemeral. Others first saw these portraits in Memphis magazine, or when exhibited by Crosstown Arts in February. But it takes the more contemplative space of a book in your lap to bring it home: Here was someone seeing all of us, bearing witness, even as we bore witness to the friends and neighbors we saw through Harmon’s work. In pairing strangers with more familiar faces, this book forges an all-embracing, democratic vision of who we were.
Writ large, the expressions lean toward the grim, the anxiety-ridden. They’re not unlike dignified 19th-century portraits where subjects presented themselves before the lens in stillness, with the gravitas of the ages. Yet others defy such seriousness of purpose, determined to keep some fun or beauty to their lives, through funny ears, pets, or mugging for the camera. Or, as with that person wearing a tyrannosaurus rex suit in their living room, through all of the above.
It’s a credit to the inventiveness of both Harmon and his subjects that the book presents hundreds of variations in setting, color, lighting, and mood. Some, like Ben Siler, Andria Brown, or Flyer alum Chris Davis, offer writings from or inspired by the time. But most of these portraits are resolutely anonymous, all of us reduced to that stalwart everyman or everywoman bent on survival. In a nod to the many who agreed to have their portrait published (some didn’t), Harmon lists the 814 folders of images in the order he shot them over two and a half months. They’re not meant to identify the subjects; they’re just another artifact of this anthropologist’s journey, from the outside to the inside in the click of a shutter.
This photo perfectly encapsulates the feeling of March 2020. (Credit: Jamie Harmon)
On March 13, 2020, Jamie Harmon took a photo of his friends Ryan Azada and Maria Applegate peering from behind a screen door. When he posted the photo to Instagram, he asked if others would be interested in participating in this new project of documenting families inside their homes from the outside looking in. It was the beginning of the lockdown period of the pandemic, when naiveté told us that this coronavirus would pass soon enough, that a new hobby, project, or binge-watch would keep us sane in the meantime.
“I was thinking it was only going to be a two-week project,” Harmon says. “Over that two weeks, I had over a hundred people texting me and messaging me [to sign up].” Soon enough, word of the project spread in newspapers and even on CBS Sunday Morning. “I started getting more diverse kinds of people and locations once it left social media.”
Barbara Schroeder poses as a T-rex. (Credit: Jamie Harmon)
Over the two-and-a-half-month course of this project, Harmon photographed more than 1,200 residents at over 800 homes across the Greater Memphis area, as far out as Millington, Mumford, and even Hernando. Each participant received a weblink with edited photos that they could download, free of charge.
“This was just something we were doing because we had nothing else to do and it felt like something good to do,” Harmon says. “A lot of people were dealing with stuff, and I had one singular focus and that made it easier for me because I was doing what I loved to do anyway.”
Self portrait of the artist (Credit: Jamie Harmon)
Each shoot took around 15 minutes, so Harmon could visit as many homes as possible in a day. During the sessions, Harmon, geared with only one light and one camera, shot three locations at every house, letting the family pick one of the spots while he chose the others. With the photographer outside and his subjects inside their homes, the two parties communicated via phone. “Everything’s a collaboration,” Harmon says. “I wanted the families to be involved; I wanted the kids to have ideas. … A lot of the times the parents were like, ‘I don’t have a creative bone in my body; I’ll just do whatever you want,’ and then you start telling them what to do and then they start having ideas and they chime in.
“Everybody was excited that something was happening,” Harmon continues. “It was something to break up the day.” Despite this excitement spurred in these 15 minutes, Harmon would make sure to have his subjects try on a stoic face for at least a few of the photos — the photos that would later make up his current exhibition.
“It’s almost a joke because when somebody tells you to have no expression, generally you start laughing,” Harmon says. “So even though it looks pretty somber, it’s a very different experience.” Yet these opposing emotions that wavered between concern and relief, boredom and excitement, reflected the rollercoaster of quarantine, for even on days when we celebrated birthdays or cheered on virtual graduation ceremonies, Harmon says, “Definitely in the middle of the night, I think we all felt a little panicked.”
But as much as this project was a comfort for Harmon, the project was also a comfort to its participants, who felt like they were a part of something larger than themselves, a part of a bigger picture. Harmon says, “I think a lot of the people who signed up saw it as something I didn’t notice at the time, which is two years later there’s an exhibit up.”
The exhibit will remain on display at Crosstown Arts until April 10th, with a closing reception on April 10th at 3-5 p.m. A book of the photos seen in the exhibition is available for pre-order at memphisquarantine.com.
“Memphis Quarantine” is on view at Crosstown Arts. (Credit: Jamie Harmon)
