BLOOMFIELD, NJ — Telephoto lenses have been coming in handy for Elzbieta Kaciuba over the past couple of months.
The Bloomfield-based photographer has been using them to take photos while staying socially distant for the Front Porch Project, an archive of pictures documenting how families in town are dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting stay-at-home orders. Normally Kaciuba is a corporate photographer who works with colleges and hospitals, but for obvious reasons, those jobs have temporarily dried up.
“In the early part of April my husband was watching a news show and saw that someone was doing it in Arizona,” Kaciuba said in a phone interview with the Independent Press on May 21. “I think it’s nice for all of us to give back to our communities, so I’m doing it for free and then hoping to make it into an exhibition.”
The photos she’s taken show residents in the front of their homes. It’s up to them what they want to wear in the pictures and what they’re doing. As a photographer with a lot of experience taking pictures of people, Kaciuba said she doesn’t stage anything.
“It’s always about them,” she said. “You can be as formal or as casual as you want. You can do whatever you want. It’s not about me, I’m just the outside person taking the picture.”
Inspired by the book and blog “Humans of New York,” where photographer Brandon Stanton takes street portraits and tells a story about each subject, Kaciuba has been talking to her subjects as well. She asks them to fill out a questionnaire about themselves and the people they’ll be photographed with, and their stories are posted on Kaciuba’s Facebook page along with the photo.
“Because I know their story when I get there, it makes them a little more comfortable,” she said. “It creates a dialogue. Then I just let them be. I don’t want them to look so structured.”
Shooting from 10 to 15 feet away is working for now, but Kaciuba misses using a wider angle lens that would allow her to be closer to her subjects. In addition to corporate photography, she also takes photos at events, which have also all been shut down for the time being. There’s no telling yet when that kind of photography will be safe to do again.
“I’m not going back to that way of shooting until there’s a vaccine,” Kaciuba said. “These are not normal times now, and I don’t see it going back to the way it was right away.”
When restrictions are lifted and it’s possible to be in an art gallery again, she’s hoping to turn the Front Porch Project into an exhibition, displaying the faces of Bloomfield’s quarantined residents in one place. Until then, her shutter is still clicking. Kaciuba can be contacted to take photos at www.facebook.com/ekaciuba or ella@elzphoto.com.
“I approach it as, ‘Let me do something I would want hanging on my wall,’” she said. “It’s kept me visually connected and in my community.”
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