Author: ARIANNE GONZALEZ

For my video pitch I have two main ideas: The first is to document a friend who has been restoring a pandemic during the pandemic. The second is to capture another friend’s plant collection and how he has kept that going during the pandemic.

https://soundcloud.com/user-50671348/depop/s-OdpSjuxF674

Host Intro: In 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic has transformed consumer habits with more people shopping online than ever before. This has led to the popularity of online marketplaces such as Depop, where buyers and sellers can easily connect on a social platform. Arianne Gonzalez talks with two young sellers about how business has been for them on the platform during the pandemic.

 AMBI: Train sounds pulling in at the train station.

TRACK: I’m pulling into the Croton Falls station on the Harlem Line of the Metro-North on a crisp fall day to visit Jean Basiletti in her art studio. The pandemic has been a difficult time for many artists,  but she tells me that she is managing and even thriving. 

 ACT: I think my creativity has increased, to be honest. I’m very lucky. I think… how do I put this? Well, I’ve got tons of free time, and I have all these things that I’ve always wanted to do.

 TRACK: Basiletti, a 19-year old college student from Brewster New York has been artistic most of her life. Hailing from a creative family and developing her skills since the age of 2, she has used her summer free time to work on different projects.

 ACT:   I’ve started carving stamps. I’m looking at it right now. And I’ve been stamping them onto paper—a form of printmaking with rubber blocks. I’ve also been sewing a lot, sewing shirts and dresses and bandanas. And posting them on Depop actually where they have been, they did sell pretty well but that was more of my summer thing.

 TRACK: Depop, a mobile marketplace for art and fashion, has grown in popularity over the past year. Basiletti says she first got onto the platform as a way to resell clothes she didn’t want anymore, but then she started designing things to sell.

ACT: I made a friend at college who was very into fashion and she would also sew her own stuff. And I would look at it and I would be like, “Oh it’s so cool, like I want to try.” She has a style of shirt, the design she created by herself and I was like, “Can I try to make what you made?” And she was like, “Yeah, sure, and you can resell it too.” And I was like, “I probably won’t, but ok”. And I made it and it turned out really nice, but it was probably something I would never wear. So I was like, ‘let me try.’ And it totally took off.

TRACK: The London startup has 15 million users worldwide. Despite the competition, there are ways for users to be easily recognized as a top seller. Sophie Scott, a verified seller on Depop based in Denver, Colorado, tells me of the Top Seller program the platform has.

ACT: I’m a verified seller by Depop, which means that they just kind of like promote my shop. And I get like a little blue checkmark on my account and like I’m, I’m in like a group chat with all of the top sellers in the world. To stay in the top seller program, you have to sell 50 items, a month.  

TRACK: Scott, who has just reached her 400th sale, has been a member of the platform since the summer of 2019 but has only dedicated her time to it at the start of the pandemic. 

ACT: I got home from school. I didn’t have a job and like I really couldn’t get a job. I’m also a type one diabetic. So, my immune system is already more compromised. So, for me to like, for instance, get a job at like a grocery store or somewhere where there’s a lot of traffic like that can be very compromising towards my health. And so like Depop really allows me to kind of be my own boss and work with myself. 

TRACK: She mostly sells clothes she finds at local thrift stores and makes sure to follow Covid-19 protocols when handling her shipments. 

ACT:  I wear masks every time I go to the thrift store and just try to stay away from people. And then I like wash everything that I buy which you should do, regardless if we were in a pandemic or not, you know, you just don’t know what kind of germs are on these random people’s clothes.

TRACK: Basiletti concurs about washing clothes, and also adds wearing gloves and sanitizing before packaging items. She also notes the risk with shipping items.

ACT: I think when you do receive packages or send things out you do have to admit there is a little bit of a risk when you’re getting your stuff. But you trust the other person is also taking care of themselves.

TRACK: Scott hopes to keep up to par with the worldwide top sellers as the competition continues to grow.

ACT: I have noticed that what I’m doing, has become more of a popular thing especially during the pandemic. So competition is getting higher. So I’m hoping that I can like keep going, you know, and knock it like pushed out of it, in a way.

TRACK: She also mentions hope of opening her own in-person store, expanding her business from the online platform to the physical world.

ACT: Regardless of what happens with Depop. I’m hoping to like open a store or like convert like a bus or something and do like a mobile vintage store go to like events. Hopefully, the pandemic will be over by that time

 For Baruch College, this is Arianne Gonzalez in Croton Falls, New York.

 

https://soundcloud.com/user-50671348/agonzalez-sampleaudio/s-BrorPVRV60Q

I was thinking of migrating my initial idea for my photo essay onto my radio story. I wanted to follow local artists as they’ve continued to create during the pandemic. There is one in particular who rented out an art studio to help facilitate her creativity and her small business. Another idea would be to follow high school seniors as they navigate the new school year, especially since the high school where I attended is doing a combination of in-person and online.

I attended Jennifer McClure’s Leica Conversations “On Creating A Visual Diary.” She is an award-winning fine arts photographer who specializes in self-portraiture.

I thought it was quite intriguing that this project began quite organically for McClure as she said she did not set out to make a visual diary on the outset of quarantine. Rather, it was more to give herself a daily exercise to help get through the tedium of self-isolating and capture that early sense of desperation. She and her husband are at higher risk and stayed indoors with their toddler for the first few months of quarantine. She explains that when one stays in the same place for a while, one gets to see the same patterns of light that stream across the window. So, she started scheduling her shots around particular times of the day.

As the quarantine wore on, McClure began integrating Covid-19 paraphernalia with the more curated studio shots with her toddler. She tried capturing her daughter’s reactions to masks and whatnot as she had no pre-assigned meaning to any of those objects prior to the pandemic.

She also proposed that since the first few months were kind of parallels, it was a challenge on how to find new ways to shoot, and said that she looks for a photo that she loves and has not seen before. She also explains that she thinks a successful photo is one that fully portrays the emotion that it sets out to capture, whether it be joy or pain.

McClure uses Leica’s touch focus and simultaneous shutter release to her advantage, takes multiple shots and does not fear blurry shots. She explains that amidst the blurry shots there will be great shots in the mix.

She embraces the idea of not knowing the end result of her photos. She knows a project has ended either by a gut feeling or when she is clear that what she has learned is shown visually.

Overall, I really enjoyed her insight on taking photos constantly, seeing photography as a visual exercise, and balancing documenting their daily life as a family whilst also being present in the exact moment.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eZHmamMM7ScTSJTRBPhsf7Ko506Lies4/view?usp=sharing

For my photo essay idea, I had a few ideas floating around my head. My main idea is to follow local artists in town as they’ve continued to create–or in fact, create more– during the pandemic. I want to highlight the local artists in my community who have also turned their creations into small online businesses. I think this would be interesting as it would show how the arts have become a method to help cope with the pandemic. This feels like the most feasible for me.

My other ideas include: first, following college freshman who are dealing with their first semester at home; second, following a local Thai restaurant that is very active on social media and the helps the local BLM protestors; and lastly, documenting the weekly Black Lives Matter protestors at the local courthouse. The final idea would seem like a good one considering the circumstances we are in, but I am not entirely sure about the logistics or in fact, safety, since they were met with backlash from anti-protestors two weeks ago.