Shifting Ground

An open call for visual reports capturing our changing relationship to public and private space in 2020 and 2021.

The events of 2020 and 2021 radically reconfigured our relationship with our immediate surroundings.

The outbreak of COVID-19 and subsequent shutdown of cities around the world kept many people confined to their homes and neighborhoods, prompting them to observe both their domestic spaces and the surrounding streets at a new level of detail.

A few months later, the murder of George Floyd led to protests on a scale not seen since the civil rights movement, with people around the world taking over public spaces to demand justice for Black and brown communities.

In July 2020, the League put out an open call for photographs, videos, or drawings accompanied by short written observations about the spaces around us, with the goal of creating a visual archive capturing the relationship between society and the built environment during this unprecedented time.

Select reports were published on our Instagram account in 2020 and 2021.