In the spring, we were surprised by photographs of abandoned tourist sites, but did not tell the full story
Last modified Saturday, November 28, 2020 at 4:38 p. m. GMT
I’ve been in recent years in the shots taken in mid-March of the global emptying. Many of these photographs were taken from above or from wide angles, revealing vast expanses of area where other people were. become vacant: Times Square ceased to be boisterous; only the pigeons passed through the squares near the Eiffel Tower; The view of the Spanish Steps revealed an uninhabited part of Rome. The railway platformers, airport terminals, sports stadiums, concert halls and car parks in grocery shopping malls seemed suddenly and strangely empty. Even the beaches, seen from above, seemed stripped of human life. .
I locate those perversely beautiful shots. They witness something really terrible: the pandemic, but also the sudden suspension of social life and the public network that began in March and yet would possibly be harboring the seed of a twisted visual fantasy of being the last user on Earth. , achieving a kind of apocalyptic loneliness and experiencing past looks of the synthetic and herbal global in a solitary ecstasy. After all, that’s why, normally, many of us move to museums in off-season hours and travel out of season: away from each other and being almost alone in charming spaces. On an elementary level, I believe that the visual appeal of these strange shots comes from a position of latent alienation, from a dark preference for maintaining the past appearance of the global for us.
But those mid-March images, taken as the first wave of global blockades, were in fact evidence of some hope: giant portions of the world were closing, totally or exclusively, to prevent the spread of coronavirus. running from one position to another has prevented. In towns and cities around the world, many others have stayed at home as a component of a network effort to protect themselves and others. These images of vacancies can simply be read not in terms of alienation and selfishness, but as photographs of a mode of solidarity unknown to abstention.
It’s hard to think about because the most remarkable photographs of mass solidarity come in the form of bodies on the streets, as they did in June, when millions of other people took to the streets around the world in anger and mourning for George’s murders. Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others through American police officers. Photos and videos of this summer’s global Black Lives Matter occasions are at most a photonegative of photos from the empty world, and move in contrast. Many of us had become accustomed to our distance from all. each other and our circumscribed internal globals; then, all of a sudden, once again, we were close to each other, spreading through the streets. When I think about 2020, I think of those two sets of photographs, empty streets and entire streets, and two types of network impulses that encouraged our global trouble.
These days, however, I return to photographs of the global void with a certain sense of terror, for we are in a strange and dark phase of the pandemic. Despite all the cautious hope or so-called narrative closure that is being re-provided through a vaccine, the spread of the virus is rapidly accelerating in North America, while economic consequences and human cost are spreading around the world. I read about hospitals and overworked health workers. I read terrible accounts of daily deaths. But this time, it makes no sense of the wonderful global pause. In some countries, the timing of the third wave of blockade has begun; others remain stubborn or helpless. Blockades and closed businesses receive little support from governments seeking to identify them. Avoidable supplier deaths appear to have been naturalized or incorporated into “our” expectations, in a way that would have been unimaginable in March.
So I look at photographs of empty squares and streets in a partial attempt to reproduce the joy of the pandemic as a sudden break with normality rather than as a slower social cave that has resulted in disorders at all levels. of empty monuments, streets and mass parking lots began to appear in newspapers and magazines, they were transparent evidence that anything vital was happening on a global scale, anything that caused a pause in human life as we knew it, anything I was going to have now look more like artifacts from a time when many countries seemed to coordinate similar responses , when the pandemic had not become the norm, where suspension and containment still seemed imaginable and perhaps imminent, if it can simply remain within.
But now I also know that those photos, taken together, were part of an exercise in creating myths. In fact, the global never stopped or emptied. In fact, we’ve never been together. In fact, the virus wasn’t the big equalizer that paused everything. Many other people continued to go to work, either because they were suddenly considered “essential” or simply because they had to. For many other people, life has not stopped completely. ; it’s just become more dangerous. The world never seemed to be populated alone through certain issues of sight.
Sophie Haigney writes about generation and culture