Abstract

Churchill's portrait Melanie, March 2020 was selected for inclusion in the Mass Isolation photo mosaic created by The People's Picture and unveiled as part of the #massisolationFORMAT project at the FORMAT21 International Photography Festival, installed at Quad, Derby in 2021. The People's Picture, led by artist Helen Marshall, composes large-scale mosaic artworks from thousands of crowd-sourced images. Inspired by the 1937 Mass Observation project, FORMAT invited the public to use the hashtag #massisolationFORMAT to build a collective visual record of the Covid-19 crisis on Instagram. Established at the start of the March 2020 lockdown, the mass-participation project gathered over 40,000 photographic submissions from more than 90 countries, documenting people's experiences of living through the pandemic. Churchill's image was among those incorporated into the final mosaic.