'Toba David / Bad' print by Robert Speker with Sydmar Lodge Care Home

Print 'Toba David / Bad' reconstruction album cover by Robert Speker, 2020. Produced with Sydmar Lodge Care Home residents and staff during the first Covid-19 Lockdown in the UK. Copying an album cover by Michael Jackson, Toba appears three-quarter length behind a walking frame wearing a black leather jacket. Lettering in red and black against a white background. Printed at the size of a standard LP record sleeve.

This set of 12 Care Home Album Covers attracted significant media attention in July 2020 after being tweeted by photographer Robert Speker. Working as Activities Coordinator at Sydmar Lodge Care Home, North London, Speker collaborated with residents and staff to recreate a series of famous album covers. In each case the figures in the album photographs are replaced by a care home individual, and the artist’s name or album title are replaced with the new sitter’s name or a reference to the care home.

Toba posed for the eleventh photo in the series, and recreated Michael Jackson's 1987 album ‘Bad’. Speker explains that he, “used Toba to recreate this classic album cover and all that was required was a leather jacket, and since no hairdressers had been allowed into the care home since lockdown, I touched up Toba's roots with aerosol spray. Toba perfected the Michael Jackson look with ease, and I ensured that Toba's walking frame was included in the image, again an essential part of her being able to walk independently.”

These first 12 album covers produced by Speker and care home contributors were developed into a charity calendar for the Alzheimer’s Society for 2021. Together they help to capture the particular experience of those living and working in care homes during the Covid-19 pandemic, which attracted wide media attention and public criticism for seeming to be ‘abandoned’ and for the extreme isolation imposed on residents, unable to see loved ones for many months. Equally, however, Speker’s joyful work demonstrates the creativity that flowered across society during the first lockdown, and the work by many artists to offer support – whether financial or emotional – to NHS staff, the wider public, and each other.