Early in the pandemic shutdown last spring, portrait photographer Anita Buzzy Prentiss saw her work dry up.
At the same time, like many of us, she was “sad and scared,” she said, “not sure about going out.” Then her best friend, Ellen Beckjord, sent her a news clip about a photographer doing porch portraits of families in another city.
It was a prompt that she initially pushed back against. The pandemic was still new, and people were hearing a mix of messages about how to safeguard against the coronavirus. She was home with her husband and two daughters, ages 12 and 15, and although she was putting up a good front, sometimes she would wake up suddenly, terrified about the future.
She said she thought there was no way she would put herself out there, then she quickly reconsidered.
“I thought. ‘I could do that. Spread some joy and hope and goodwill.’”
At the very least, it would get her out of her isolation safely.
She put the word out on social media that she was looking for people who would be willing to come out onto their porches for portraits.
“I started getting so many requests,” she said. “I took photographs of 250” individuals and families.
She said she hoped it would generate donations, and, in the back of her mind, she thought something like this could be a good marketing strategy to get her name out there.
The project ended up as a book, “Porchraits,” for which she chose 72 who live from Scott to Fox Chapel, from the West End to Squirrel Hill, from Wilkinsburg to Lincoln Place. Some people paid her, and she got enough additional donations to pay for the book, she said.
Ms. Beckjord, her friend since childhood, is a clinical psychologist who assisted her with some qualitative research in coming up with a set of questions to ask each subject household: What do you miss? What is surprising you? What are you learning? What do you hope for? What are you enjoying?
Those answers are synthesized among the comments that go with each photograph.
“She was telling me how people were sharing a lot of stories with her,” Ms. Beckjord said. “They were having a lot of common experiences that were comforting to me. People were really strong and hopeful. We did this over three to four months and heard that people had experienced deaths, births, weddings, bar mitzvahs, the full spectrum of life experiences. It seemed that life had come to a grinding halt, but life was going on.”
One subject was designer John Eastman, who lives in Swissvale and operates Eastman Tribe, a designing firm, in Regent Square. He knew Ms. Prentiss from the Parisi Cafe near his home.
“I was there having a cup of coffee, and the owner told me that Buzzy was doing this project,” he said. He signed on to be photographed.
His portrait is not on his porch but at a table in his backyard, a table that he designed with a friend.
He said the pandemic has affirmed his affinity for minimalism, “and I find that I am more of a minimalist than ever now,” he said. “I am enjoying the scarcity of things. You pay more attention to what is there, and that’s valuable. If you’re an observer, that’s an opportunity to see that you can do more with less.”
In his comment, he includes this hopeful statement: “If there is a lesson to be learned during this, it may be that it’s a great time to reinvent your life.”
He said he took part in the project in part because he knows Ms. Prentiss’ work.
“She has a way of capturing the essence of a thing,” he said.
Another subject, Roxanne Williams of Wilkinsburg, is photographed with her daughter Dahlia. She is shown holding the little girl, whose head rests against her mother’s left arm.
In her comment in the book, Ms. Williams said, “I didn’t realize how much I was letting the expectations of society raise my daughter rather than my best judgment. I didn’t know what my best judgment even was until I had no distractions from the outside world and it was just her and me.
“We battled a lot at first to find ‘normal’ in the confusion. And then, I let go. Things started coming together. I still can’t believe how much I am able to accomplish with so little effort, and how happy and at peace we are! I have learned that I am a good Mom. I don’t have to ‘try.’”
Many subjects of the photographs told Ms. Prentiss and Ms. Beckjord that they are making the best of it, surprised at their resiliency, reassessing their values and how they spend their time.
For Ms. Prentiss, the experience opened her to the possibility of other projects like this. She even made some money taking portraits of high school graduates, thanks to her social media outreach.
“But mainly it made me really happy, made me connect with a whole lot of people and forming a spirited bond. “People told me this was the high point of their day.”
Diana Nelson Jones: djones@post-gazette.com.
First Published: October 13, 2020, 10:15 a.m.
