In Germany, a group of carollers convenes for a singalong, surrounded by festive string lights. In Dubai, a jolly Santa Claus entertains children against the backdrop of his Lapland workshop. In the Southeast U.S., an extended family gathers together for a story to celebrate Kwanzaa; across the country, children light the menorah and play with dreidels during Hanukkah. It might sound like your typical global patchwork of holiday celebrations and get-togethers, but this year it happened entirely on Zoom.
The German photographer Thomas Dworzak has made it his goal to document this new normal for holiday festivities. From the early days of lockdown at the beginning of the year, Dworzak has been joining Zoom groups and observing how our most hallowed rituals—everything from election night parties to funerals—have translated to the digital sphere. “I could have photographed this year in a more traditional way, but somehow I figured I should do it differently,” says Dworzak. “I didn t really want to go out and take photos of this empty world, and meanwhile, there was this whole other world appearing on Zoom.” As the holiday season approached, Dworzak began reaching out to communities and asking if he could join their Zoom calls; over the past few days, he’s been moving from one to the other almost non-stop. “I’m glad to be finally off my computer,” he laughs.
Dworzak’s background as a photographer lies largely in photojournalism, spending the past three decades covering conflicts in regions as far-flung as the Caucasus, Northern Ireland, and Palestine. (One of his best-known bodies of work came after he traveled to Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11 on assignment for The New Yorker, with his hand-colored portraits of Taliban soldiers becoming an eerie document of a pivotal moment in Middle Eastern history.) A member of Magnum Photos since 2004, he was elected President of Magnum in 2017.
And while the subject matter of his Zoom series may be more quotidian, his experience as a reporter came in handy all the same—not least in gaining entry to some of the more intimate online gatherings, which required just as much initiative to penetrate as a political summit or army camp. “I sort of tried to do what I would do anyway as a photojournalist,” he adds. “I wanted to document what people were doing, and get into these new worlds.”
For Dworzak, one of the most striking elements of these Zoom celebrations was the heightened sense of intimacy. While it might seem paradoxical given the physical distance between participants, it makes more sense when viewed in light of the fact that events that would usually take place in churches or synagogues are now taking place from the privacy of people’s homes. The end product is something that feels deeply poignant: a document of how communities, whether religious or cultural, have found ways to connect throughout a devastating year, and in particular the way in which they’ve been able to find moments of joy and levity from afar.
It’s also here that the challenge lay for Dworzak as a photographer: to find those split-second moments that transcended the visual monotony of online video calls, even as they felt more elusive than ever. “It s funny how they often end up looking the same, the board meeting, the church service, the funeral, the party, it s the same grid of six people in the first line, four down,” he says. “It has its limitations in visual joy, to put it more diplomatically. There s nothing I can do, I can t move to the left, I can t move to the right, I m stuck to this grid. Sometimes it s frustrating, but at the same time, I enjoy the fact I have no control.”
Ironically, it’s this lack of control that feels most timely of all. “Some of them work out, and they turn out to be really interesting, and then other times, nothing really happens—it s just five or six people on a Zoom call,” Dworzak says. “There are none of the usual measurements which allow you to get a feel ahead of time. It s a little bit like street photography really, when you aimlessly walk around a place you haven t been to before, but you re trying to take pictures. And you wander around and try different things and sometimes it leads nowhere. It s not dissimilar—just virtual.”
