Customer manager Ilka says she is suddenly spending more time with her children than ever before.

Bank employee Jasmina says that instead of going on a business trip, she can now relax at the weekend.

The doctor Clemens reports that he was able to reconsider his career and changed his job.

Falk Heunemann

Business editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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It's not all bad in the Corona crisis.

At least that's what a photo exhibition in the Frankfurt trade union building is currently trying to show.

There you can see portraits of 14 employees from the Rhine-Main area - including the bank employee, the customer manager and the doctor - who report on their very personal Corona crisis experience.

They were photographed and interviewed by the photographer Anouchka Olszewski, who also provided illustrative photos for each portrait that make the benefit of the crisis obvious: pictures of mushrooms, for example, which the kindergarten teacher Kirsten discovered on a walk in the forest.

Or the drawer with yarn and twine from the student and hobby seamstress Yasmina, who can now study from her home office and no longer has to constantly commute to Frankfurt by train.

“experienced massive deceleration”

"People experienced a massive deceleration during the crisis," sums up photographer Olszewski.

Because the usual routines of a working week were suddenly broken and many had to go to the home office, many people have reconsidered their time management, their priorities and the importance of friends and family.

The portraits were taken after hours of conversations in November 2020, shortly before the start of the second lockdown.

The exhibition "Corona - a chance?" was expressly intended as an "encouragement project", explains the Frankfurt Verdi trade unionist Peter Giefer from the association Fototeam Hessen, who organized the exhibition in the trade union building together with the photographer Olszewski.

It will be on display there free of charge until the end of April.

However, the fact that the crisis does have negative sides can be seen again and again in the texts: customer manager Ilka, for example, had to go on short-time work, restaurateur Ruben therefore had time for nature because the restaurant had to close for months in the first lockdown.

The exciting question now, says Olszewski, is what employees and their protagonists will take with them from the crisis into the post-crisis period.

"The home office will stay," she is sure.

But in five years she wants to investigate whether this also applies to new daily routines, more time for hobbies and more appreciation of the family - and document it photographically.