This photographer documented life as a young person during the pandemic

From December 2020, he spent 18-months taking photos of his young friends coping with the realities of life during the pandemic.

New Year’s Eve 2020 was peculiar for many of us. As Coronavirus continued to sweep the globe, usual end-of-year reflections were replaced by a build-up of collective grief. Around the world, Covid-19 socializing restrictions put obstacles in the way of celebrations. For German photographer Valentin Goppel, the uniqueness of the situation was underscored by his companions: Instead of his spending the night with his flatmates as he would do usually, he was instead alone with his girlfriend’s younger brother and two of his friends, making the initial images for what would become Goppel’s first photobook, “Zwischen den Jahren.” “For weeks before, her brother had tried to persuade his parents to let him spend New Year’s Eve with his friends, which (as a young person) I found really understandable, but his parents didn’t,” the photographer recalled in an interview with CNN. “In the end, (they relented when) he agreed to spend four days (quarantining) in his room afterwards. It was a strange thing, this commitment to meeting your friends just for a few hours — then spending days alone — but to him it was worth it.” After returning home from photographing the boys, Goppel confessed he pondered his reasons for doing so. “I was like ‘why am I doing all of this?’. I would rather have spent the time with my girlfriend!” But the evening became the starting point for a wider project about young people, lockdown and mental health. “Zwischen den Jahren” translates as “between the years” and is a common expression in Germany for the last days of December. The title is also, however, a rich characterization of the disorientated state of limbo experienced throughout the pandemic, particularly by teens and those at university. Encouraged by a commission from German newspaper Die Zeit, following his New Year’s Eve shoot, Goppel spent the next 18-months taking photos, with his young subjects frequently lit by the glow of a laptop screen, pictured wearing face masks, or meeting outdoors — the realities of life during the pandemic. In some instances, Goppel set up his camera and observed those around him, and at others he staged specific scenarios from the recent past.