THE YEAR : ZERO PROJECT
It has always been my dream to get my work into as many hands and eyes as possible, and during our lock down periods of 2020-2021, I was one of the 'lucky' ones who were allowed out of the house everyday and go to work as my day to day job was classified as an essential service.
As 95% of our entire population was confined to their dwellings, only allowed out one person per household to get essential foods or medicine, I thought to myself that I was in a unique position to capture images of the world outside that literally nobody else could capture at that moment in time.
This thought then snowballed into the Year : Zero project, capturing the world how it was during those lock down days, and how the world looked in the very first year, or Year Zero if you will, after a global pandemic.
Every day at 11am, every TV set, mobile phone and radio were tuned in to our State Premier and the Chief Medical Officer's live stream, giving a scared NSW the tally of new coronavirus infections and deaths that had been recorded over the past 24hrs.
All we heard for months and months on end were covid numbers, stay inside, don't leave your house, wear a mask, social distancing (even among your household), go and get tested, quarantine, rapid antigen tests, PPE, Pfizer's better, AstraZeneca's better, Moderna's better, double vaxxed, booster shots.
My photography at this point in time was an escape from all of that. I wanted to show people that were stuck in their homes that there still was a world waiting for them outside, no matter how far away that was for many citizens.
Our world finally opened up, not to everyone mind you, in October 2021.
This date marked the birth of our new world, the new normal.
Welcome to Year : Zero.
~
October 11th, 2021. Sydney, Australia.
"Freedom Day"
The date that our lives were allowed to be returned to a society that had been under the strictest government lock down in the world due to the Coronavirus quarantine laws. Well, only if you were double vaxxed.
This book tells the story of how our society looked straight out of the toughest times since the last world war in our country, and how our once vibrant city was slowly revived. Some things were vastly different, some things were exactly the same. Some for better, some for worse.
Year : Zero takes the reader on a photographic journey from the city streets, to the skies, the live music venues, the underground, the taboo (exclusive to the collectors edition), the abandoned and pretty much everything in between.
Over 350 pages and 700 images, all captured in our 'new normal' world.
CHAPTER LIST
1. Post Covid Survival Horror
2. The Places Time Forgot
3. The Return of Sound
4. On The Road Again
(5. Someone's Significant Other - Exclusive chapter only available in the Hardcover Kickstarter Exclusive Edition)
ABOUT MATT BARTOLO
Let me start of by saying that I am not your everyday photographer.
I don't do weddings.
I don't do head shots.
I don't do portraits (well, not in the traditional sense anyway)
I specialize in the opposite.
The dark, gritty, tell-it-like-it-is style of photography.
You can usually find me in the creepy abandoned buildings scattered amongst suburbia, in the underground clubs that you've probably only heard rumors about (and before you ask, yes, those rumors are probably true, and the stories that those walls tell are not for the faint of heart), the live music venues that hold half a dozen punters to the 20,000 seat capacity theaters or simply just walking the streets with my trusty Canon.
TESTIMONIALS
"A pretty brave concept, 5 chapters that ultimately could stand alone as individual books in their own right.....and the photography is first class"
- Editor of Carpet Bombing Culture
"I've been waiting for Matt to put out a collection of his work for some time, but man I was not expecting something as well done as this. Just buy this book, nothing more needs to be said"
- Curator of Rogue's Gallery
"Utterly brilliant. And extremely well captured!"