Shot from the heart Winnipegger's photo essay, part of The Other Hundred series, captures personal side of global pandemic By: Jen Zoratti Posted: 7:00 PM CST Monday, Nov. 16, 2020

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This article was published 16/11/2020 (1783 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The saying might be “one in a million,” but Winnipeg photographer Prabhjot Singh Lotey is honoured to be one in a hundred.

His photo essay was selected out of thousands of submissions to represent Canada in The Other Hundred Healers, the fourth edition of the prestigious The Other Hundred series, an annual, global non-profit photojournalism initiative that aims to tell precisely the kinds of stories Singh Lotey naturally gravitates toward.

“It recognizes the people who do not often get any media highlight,” he says. “Ever since I’ve started doing photography, I’ve always wanted to focus on stories which have some sort of positive impact on society.”

Each edition of The Other Hundred begins with an international photo competition pegged to a specific theme. One hundred stories and images are selected from around the globe and are then published in a photo book.

This year’s theme was obvious. The COVID-19 pandemic spans every continent, and the stories told in this year’s project take us everywhere, from an organic farm in Colombia that’s ensuring people have access to healthy food in lockdown to the challenges faced by a beekeeper in China.

Singh Lotey’s subject was Angela Taylor, the founder of Inspire Community Outreach, a non-profit social services agency in Winnipeg. Taylor and her team work with those living with mental-health issues and neurological/cognitive differences. Singh Lotey documented her pandemic experience — figuring out how to support her clients distantly and virtually, building forts with her kids, and painting, which is her outlet for stress relief — in a series of quietly beautiful photos.

“I was basically very inspired by the kind of work she does,” he says. “In this pandemic, we have heard from people having small businesses being affected, the working class, but I’ve heard much less about people with disabilities or mental-health problems.”

His photos — as well as the rest of the essays in The Other Hundred Healers — personalize a global issue, and offer proof that the subject matter doesn’t need to be dramatic to have resonance.

“If you get to know a story so closely about some individual, it creates a lot more impact,” Singh Lotey says. “You get to know inside details. I got really personally inspired by (Angela’s) personality. They way she was handling everything, her work, her family — I got really moved by it.”

Singh Lotey moved to Winnipeg from India just under two years ago. He says it felt really good to represent his new home country in this project, and that the transition to living in a cold Prairie city has been mostly positive; getting established in a new country comes with stress.

In addition to documenting the pandemic from behind the camera, he also works as a supervisor at a grocery store, so he’s had the experience of essential worker as well.

COVID-19 hasn’t been the only seismic event he’s captured in 2020. In June, he documented the Justice 4 Black Lives rally, taking striking photos of the protesters at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights.

“That was very, very extraordinary event,” he says. “To see so many young people out on the road, the atmosphere was something that cannot be explained in words. So much energy was there. I have a natural activist in me, so any subject, any movement close to human rights, I naturally get attracted to it.”

Whether he’s documenting, say, field hockey in India, or a landmine survivor who now creates work opportunities for other disabled survivors — just two examples of his past photo projects — Singh Lotey’s raison d’être for taking photos is simple.

“I just take pictures for the love of taking pictures, that’s it,” he says. “So it doesn’t matter if I’m doing a family shoot, or I’m doing a portrait, or I’m shooting a landscape, or I’m doing a story like this, or a photo essay, it’s just the love of taking photographs, to capture those memories.

“Whatever you shoot, it becomes a part of history.”

jen.zoratti@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @JenZoratti