When I sail and soar through these stunning images from Jan Enkelmann, a photographic record of London’s lockdown, I think of John Keats, who longed for "some shape of beauty to move aside the pale..." and Dickens, who foot-traveled London's paved arteries, twelve miles a night. It's the thought of being in a place that connects us and yet, through some excellent means, has lost its familiarity and renders something new.

London's first lockdown occurred at the mid-end of March 2020; so much uncertainty, many of us returned to what we knew. Enkelmann took to the street, camera in the arm.

I happened to cycle through Westminster the evening Boris Johnson announced the lockdown, and that night the city was already deserted. It was fascinating. I immediately felt I had to capture this, thinking many people would do the same. I also had plenty of time on my hands. Being freelance, I had no work, and we were already living off our savings when the lockdown began. I usually photograph human beings, and most of my work concerns people in public spaces in one way or another. 

"I wanted to show the beauty of the city..." wrote Enkelmann in his debut book, Pause, a record of time, space, architecture, and London's buzzing, strumming, pulsing beauty. 

Leadenhall Market. Available as a print.

Enkelmann's images affect some magic memory-twisting spell that turns this horrible thing we experienced together yet separately into a thing we remember collectively.

I remember wearing gloves and a woolly hat under my bike helmet for the first couple of trips in late March and early April. Even when I went out to North Greenwich at the beginning of May, it was still cold. But then, on some of the later trips, I left the house in just a T-shirt. What was pretty consistent, though, was the sunny weather and clear skies that persisted throughout most of the lockdown period. Even though the sun had already set when many of the photos were made, a cloudless, almost unpolluted sky can be admired in many of them.

Several years ago (how many now? More than I think, sometimes less), the first of multiple lockdowns took effect in England. Most people will remember the day vividly for its infinite exactness. A day we will talk about like other days of exactness: where were you when...? When they landed on the beaches? When the planes hit the towers? When X won the election?

On the first day of lockdown, I was in a taxi traveling between the hospital and home. I had my newborn daughter with me. All newborns enter a world of uncertainty mitigated by their parent's love, but this level of uncertainty verges on absurd. We were helpless. I remember the details of the day perfectly. She was not scared of our cats. Her older sister was afraid of her. I was frightened of everything. We expanded our family to include her and then collapsed it back into itself to fit the small space that was our shared apartment.

We didn't know how it would end. If it would end, it was paralytic, catastrophic. Yet rich in detail.

The Old Vic Theatre. Available as a print.

When the Black Plague hit London almost 400 years ago, Daniel Defoe wrote: "Death reigned in every corner" in his part fictional-part journalistic coverage of the disaster. He also observed that the wealthy left town and the government issued decree after decree with little done to provide calm. And uncertainty accompanied death.

It might surprise you that Daniel Defoe wasn't there. He was born more than four decades later and pieced together a relatively accurate, almost eye-witness account from the collective memory of family members and friends.

Enkelmann pieces together his record of the Lockdown happening through these photographs. He was there, but the you who looks at these images are not.

The impulse was to capture the emptiness of places that were usually full of people, but soon I was simply fascinated to notice things, architecture, and details that I had never noticed.

It is this stunning architect that steps off the page of Pause.

Southwark Street/The Shard. Available as a print.

Covent Garden Market. Available as a print.

The only people I encountered were a few food delivery drivers on their bikes and scooters and the homeless. I spoke with a shivering couple in Piccadilly Circus. They were actively hoping to be picked up by the police as they had nowhere to go, and begging had become pointless.

Imagine being indigent and having no one around and nothing open. The relentless exposure, emptiness, and closed off-ness of a space of little comfort but at least some measure of certainty. The destruction of hunger is so completely acute a soul becomes a helpless body.

"You rarely walk along Oxford Street admiring the architecture," Enkelmann noticed. "Normally, you try to avoid bumping into other people."

Oxford Circus. Available as a print.

I locked my bike to railings on Charing Cross Road and walked across Leicester Square, where the vast LED screens of the big cinemas were either turned off or displaying messages asking people to stay at home. I feared I might be stopped by police at any moment and questioned as to what I was up to. I was reluctant to get my camera out. But there was no one about.

Leicester Square. Available as a print.

London Eye. Available as a print.

Carnaby Street. Available as a print. 

Taxi Stand/Kings Cross. Available as a print.

I first started shooting around Chinatown because I had been working on another photography project there, most of which was captured at night. It, therefore, felt natural to me to go out in the evenings, around dusk. I guess this helped to do the work what it is, as the light and night-time colours add to the atmosphere and also help to tie the images together aesthetically.

Elements often overlooked or forgotten in the mayhem of human life become powerful and persistent. As Enklemann noticed, these areas are technically ruins without the humans that made them.

Newport Place/Chinatown. Available as a print.

 North Greenwich Station.

And yet, it is not the emptiness that grabbed Enkelmann, nor will it be the emptiness that holds you in these images. It is the boasting, the invention, even the constancy.

It felt important to not create images that were sad or gloomy. I wanted to show the beauty of the city that was allowed a short breather from the usual crowds. Being not in the best state of mind myself, I felt I needed to do something positive and uplifting, and I think that’s exactly what people were looking for when they came across the work. I think many people found the pictures fascinating mainly because they were unable to go out and experience it themselves.

Regent Street. Available as a print.

Camden High Street. Available as a print.

Millennium Bridge/St. Paul's. Available as a print.

Many heartbeats and heartbreaks later, so many they defy counting, the lockdown did end (although it took much longer to give up the ghost of Covid). We met up in public spots, healed our collective, and were able to glimpse once more beauty. Changed. 

I took my daughter outside and introduced her to the world. Well, a world.

I think a lot about bearing witness to things and what it means to speak for a collective memory that is no longer held by the collective. But must be kept in history all the same lest we repeat. What do we do when 'Where were you when lockdown began?' is answered with blank stares?' How will people in the future remember if they were not there in the first place?

Susan Sontag wrote about the limits of empathy and suggested it was the failure of imagination. Is it? Imagination? Or is it a failure of knowledge, the kind that sprouts imagination?

These pictures taken by Jan Enkelmann do not just capture an empty city; they charge a stunning, imaginative, durable, bright, sparkling city. Of course, it is never wholly without people because people envisioned all of this - and made it - in the first place. And it is people - Enkelmann - who put it here for us and helps us form - and share - new knowledge of the experience. And thus, a new memory.

All images are ⓒ Jan Enkelmann, 2022, and provided courtesy of the artist.