In July 2021, one month after Sydney entered what would become a 106-day lockdown, fashion photographer Cara O’Dowd pulled the sheet off her bed, grabbed her camera and went outside. Unable to work and limited to a five-kilometre radius from her doorstep, Cara decided to focus her energy closer to home by setting up a makeshift studio on the footpath. With her husband and three-year-old daughter as her assistants, she took portraits of passing locals and gifted the photographs to them as an act of kindness during a bleak and unsettling time. As word spread through the small riverside suburb, locals used their allotted one hour of exercise to line up at Cara’s little brick house, often with a dog or child in tow, and smile into her camera lens from behind their masks.

Following a call-out for wall space and wheat paste, the Lockdown Locals project evolved into an art installation, as Cara and her helpers transformed the sides of cafes, homes, and park-side walls into a neighbourhood gallery of black-and-white posters, creating an art trail for people to enjoy on their daily walks. The project generated an exciting buzz across the neighbourhood as more photos appeared, and locals got to see themselves as larger-than-life poster stars. While those posters may have since faded and peeled off the walls, the spontaneous poses and candid moments captured by Cara are now a photographic time capsule of the long months spent in lockdown, which helped to bridge the physical distance and connect a community.

Lockdown Locals is now a large coffee page book printed in December 2021 after a successful crowdfunding campaign.