Scopo Photography
SCOPO PHOTOGRAPHY
Movement in Mourning
A Documentary Photobook
Movement in Mourning was a photo documentary series that captured the dissonance of a world forced into stillness during the COVID-19 pandemic. Each set emerged from a collaboration with people for whom movement was essential—acrobats, athletes, performers—all grappling with the sudden erasure of their craft.
Together, we used artistic expression and humor to reflect on the absurdity and grief of our shared condition. But more than commentary, this project became a space for vulnerability, a way to confront the unspoken emotions and ultimately, release them through movement.
The work stood as an elegy for the bodies suspended in time for those individuals whose identities were built on kinetic life. With Vancouver’s stages, gyms, and public spaces empty, it severed more than routines; it fractured the very rhythms that defined these individuals.
This series documented the unraveling: abandoned spaces repurposed as makeshift stages, restless energy channeled into frantic gardening, the quiet grief of artists who escaped into their imaginations, only to confront the unfamiliar stillness of their bodies.
Through photography and collaboration, we traced the anatomy of loss, not just in the absence of applause, but in the trembling hands of a gymnast relearning balance, or the intensity of a football player using trampolines as an outlet because there were no games to train for. The images were raw, sometimes chaotic, because deprivation did not follow the rules of composition. By layering documentary shots with surreal edits, each collaboration told its own story, while together, they formed a collective portrait of restriction.
The series asked: What remains when motion is stripped away? The answers flickered in small rebellions—a Cyr wheel spinning defiantly in an empty lot, a musician’s fingers twitching on their knees, a dancer’s reunion with a partner. These were not just portraits of resilience, but of metamorphosis—proof that even in stagnation, the body insisted on moving.
As we look back, the collection serves as both archive and release. It was never meant to romanticize struggle, but to document it honestly—to hold space for the frustration, absurdity, and fleeting moments of reinvention that defined those times. Originally conceived as a future publication, a reflection for our community, it now stands as a testament to what we endured, what we lost, and how, even in confinement, movement found a way.
Cage
Captured during the first chaotic weeks of lockdown, this set reflects the uncertainty of the pandemic’s early days. Two caged performance artists, clad in plague doctor masks, twisting beneath an overpass, mocking the absurdity of conflicting health advice and collective dread.
The images transform public space into a theater of collective anxiety and reluctant laughter.
PPE
A visual ode to reconnection: dancers wove 6-foot rules into their art, transforming staircases into stages, and used PPE as extensions of their compositions. Between calculated distances and unchecked joy, these frames capture the paradox of touching the air while longing to touch each other.
Prose
Birthday
Soft skin
Soft bellies
Soft gaze,
trying not to look too hard
Hard at my body
Hard on my soul
Heart in the open
Does it matter how many years pass?
I can still be that same person
Body strong
Body weak
Body able to do so many things
Body unable to do so many things
Body changing all the time
Body is the only body of anybody
Soft belly
Soft gaze,
I’m still trying not to look too hard
“These pieces, in prose and in photography, speak to my own but also collectively, the experience of many both in and out of the pandemic. As a circus artist who has dealt with body dysmorphia and disordered eating since adolescence, the pandemic has been a particularly trying time. Though rationally we know that during trauma, it is normal for our minds and our bodies to flux, but it doesn’t stop our adolescent mind from coming back.
These photos were created with the intention of making shapes that make me uncomfortable to look at as part of the journey to learn to focus on the thing the body can do, despite what it may or may not look like.”
This set immortalized the raw intimacy of pandemic "pods," where isolated celebrations became lifelines. Two partner acrobats dance through the Vancouver rain. Their dramatic lifts and poses are rendered in stark black and white, echoing a world stripped of color but pulsing with defiant joy. The images frame resilience as a shared act: water-soaked and laughing, they turned confinement into an ode to chosen family.
Pineapple Land
An elite football quarterback explores the surreal condition of limbo —his pent-up energy transformed into trampoline-propelled flights of fantasy, where he imagines himself as a superhero leading his team to victory.
Set against the absurd backdrop of "Pineapple Land" (where even his football morphs into fruit), the work visualizes the dissonance between an athlete’s disciplined identity and the playful desperation of waiting for competition’s return. Though vibrant and playful, the imagery we captured was a joke of postponed purpose and the creative coping strategies that emerge in its absence.
Movement in Mourning
A Documentary Photobook
Maria
This poignant collaboration with aerialist Maria Sample captures her maternal experience. Her silks both coddle and constrain her changing body. Shot at dockside during sunset, the images frame her suspended between strength and vulnerability: off-camera, her partner anchors the silks like a tether, while her poses oscillate between protective curls and daring extensions. The water below mirrors the sky and the silhouette, reflecting the vertigo of bringing life into a world gripped by collective unknown.
Interference
This self-documented collaboration reveals the inner negotiations of my partnership. A flyer without a base and a football player without a squad, relearning each other through the language of the other’s disciplines. In the center image, my inverted body attaches to my partner's grounded athletic posture, our touch hovering between tackle and embrace. The frames capture the tension of our dual roles: I was both photographer and falling subject, and he was both my supporter and opponent as we stretched the boundaries of sport and love in isolation.
Ana-mal
Ana-mal captures a dancer’s primal unraveling—a visceral response to the psychological toll of pandemic isolation and the fraught landscape of human connection. The performer’s feral body becomes a living study in primal duality: muscles tensed like a predator stalking through urban grasslands one moment, limbs seducing cornered prey the next. Her feral movements swing between aggression and vulnerability, embodying the raw frustration of dating rituals.
What are boundaries when we’re all just animals?
Potted Plant
This piece explores the metamorphosis of care and how nurturing devotion can twist into possessive obsession when the world contracts. Adamson’s body becomes a site of suspended growth. She is a potted plant where escapism curdles into entrapment. The psyche’s desperate crawl toward light when all familiar tethers—stage, audience, gravity itself—are replaced by the creeping logic of roots.
Flow State
The profound reunion of this Flow State duo, separated partners reestablishing their kinetic symbiosis amidst the organic textures of a west coast landscape. Their interconnected bodies navigate sun-bleached driftwood, each precisely balanced weight exchange vibrating with restrained energy and hard-won catharsis. The composition's raw physicality visually articulates the return of deeply ingrained muscle memory after pandemic-enforced separation. Between tension and release, the work explores themes of trust rediscovered, creative partnership rekindled, and the human body's remarkable capacity to retain connection across time and distance.