Eze Amos is a popular figure in Charlottesville, a photographer who turns up wherever things are happening. A native of Nigeria, he’s adopted this town as his own, taking pictures and sharing his love of place, so when the pandemic hit, he was not happy.
“I was going stir crazy at home, and I heard about a project an artist was doing in Boston. She called it the Front Step Project.”
He decided to try something like that here – offering to take family portraits in front yards, on porches and stoops.
“Let’s just put something out on Facebook and see if folks would want it, and when I posted that, about two hundred just went, ‘Yes we want it!’”
So, he recruited four other photographers— Sarah Cramer, Tom Daly, Kristen Fenn and John Robinson— to travel around town, snapping pictures of delighted subjects.
“Together we were able to photograph over 1,000 households," he recalls. "Yes, it was a crazy time, but it was beautiful to be able to go out and give people a little bit of community.”
And once the moment was recorded, Amos and friends posted their pictures on Instagram, where subjects could find them.
“And then they were texting each other – back and forth: ‘Hey, I saw your family! Oh, your kids are growing,’ or whatever,” Amos says.
People paid what they could afford – and the otherwise unemployed photographers donated half of that money to other artists who were sidelined by the pandemic. Tomorrow, from 10 to 4, the Second Street Gallery will feature the photos in a show that runs through May 23rd.
