Paul Romans: Subversive Code

Paul Romans is a London-born and bred photographer and educator who recently finished his MA in Documentary Photography and Photojournalism at the University of Westminster. His body of work Subversive Code takes the Covid-19 pandemic as its starting point but it’s ultimately concerned with the psychological spaces of stillness and trauma. It investigates the unstable territory between what Kathleen Stewart called “the dazed state of trauma and the cocooning we now call home”. When lockdown first happened in 2020 we truly became cocooned in our own homes - isolated from the outside world, allowed to spend time with our immediate surroundings and inner thoughts with seemingly no end in sight.

These photographs were made inside a quiet disaster. With incremental force, a viral disruptor infected the territories of the social and political, established new rules of engagement while exposing ideological obsessions and structural failures.

The traffic light, or semaphore, is a recurring motif in the project. The omnipresent regulator of our roads, almost universal across the globe — we all know what red, yellow and green signify along with the implicit, tacitly agreed upon instructions they give to drivers and pedestrians alike. It’s no wonder that the government decided to utilise this coding system for countries, only with a small change - caution was not yellow but amber instead (now scrapped). Romans also gives a subtle nod to ludicrous conspiracy theories such as that 5G towers cause coronavirus (no scientific or logical merit whatsoever) by photographing satellite dishes. Perhaps unintended, but this thought instantly came to mind.

We see the now all too familiar cotton swabs and personal protective equipment, biohazard seals, people in apparent distress, and the vice versa, people calm and composed in the face of a disaster, infrared thermometers, media equipment, exercise at home or in the park, laptops on laps or beds, the new home office, disinfectants and wipes. Will this become the new status quo or is it something that will pass and we’ll look back at it with dismay and wonder how it came to happen? Nobody knows at this stage, but either way, Romans’ project documents the current state of the world as we have quickly become accustomed to the so-called new normal.

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