Today, after a long hiatus, I felt like updating my blog with some history of what I did the past year after the beginning of the pandemic. March of 2021 marked 1 year of staying home without contact with any friends or participating in any special activities (with the exception of a few times I went to work and did some outdoor photo sessions). I am really proud of this project that I created from “nowhere”. At the start, I was doing a workshop virtually, with Erika Karpuk - an amazing human from Brazil that teaches how to connect your house with yourself, how to heal yourself, and how to feel welcome and in peace. She gave me an opportunity to speak to her audience, about my journey into photography, my illness with cancer in 2017, my process of rebirth after the surgery and my resignification with photography. It was so special because I made so many friends from my opportunity to speak with vulnerability. From there it extended to my own project that I called “Throughout the Blue Day”.

What exactly is “Throughout the Blue Day”?

I noticed that many of my friends had this feeling of confinement, sadness, detachment from their houses, feeling lost and hopeless. Because of my experience with the long winters in Chicago, I developed a way to immerse myself into my creativity process with a lot of stimuli - dancing, reading, insights and brain storms, conversations with friends over Skype during all these 12 years of living in the USA. I felt a need to share with my friends a way to calm their hearts, to connect with themselves, and to see their house as an extension of who they are. I started to invite them for a virtual photo session where we could chat about any topic they want or to go deep into vulnerable conversations. And at the same time I was taking “shots” of them (simply doing a “print screen” of Skype). I didn’t look for perfection or high quality sharpness. I wanted the raw, primitive, unscripted moments.

The results were amazing. First, because they were not aware of how they looked because they didn’t know the exact moments of when I was capturing them. I just wanted to connect with them through their beautiful emotions, without naming them. With Erika’s help, I extended my project to people that I didn’t know personally and my challenge was to make connections and hope that they would be vulnerable too to show their souls to me. It happened. I did.

From that I extended the project for live sessions on instagram and I started to show to the world how I make connections with people that I never saw before. How to make special encounters with strangers where you will carry a piece of them with yourself for the rest of your life. 

The name of the project means all the feelings that present in yourself through the course of 24 hours. The blue - not in a sad way - is just a touch of Jana and how I am intertwined with the person in the hours that we connected.