Where Are the Photos of People Dying of Covid?
New York Times
by Dr. Sarah Elizabeth Lewis
In times of crisis, stark images of sacrifice or consequence have often moved masses to act.
Recently, a friend, colleague and mentor, the cultural historian and critic Maurice Berger, died at 63 of complications from the coronavirus.
Every day that passes, particularly as I hear the wail of ambulance sirens going by on the West Side Highway near my window, I think of Maurice. I think of the conversations about images we might have had regarding this moment.
Much of what I know and teach about how images structure and shape issues of race and justice I learned from his scholarship and life experience. Visualization is a powerful tool — it can help us more deeply understand the severity of the situation as we work to curb the virus. But the visuals we need most in this time are difficult to come by.
I thought of Maurice when a friend living in Milan, who was among Italy’s earliest diagnosed coronavirus cases, sent me this text message in March: “If people could only see what it is like in the hospitals, they would stay at home.” He was admitted to the hospital earlier that month, but with his doctor’s agreement quickly left, feeling that his bed could be better allocated to others experiencing far worse symptoms.
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John Reekie, via The Library of Congress
We would have talked about how the impact of photographs of people affected by the tainted water in Flint, Mich., aided the start of a nationwide understanding of the unconscionable injustice uncovered by Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha and illuminated by photographers such as LaToya Ruby Frazier. We would have discussed how artists like Keith Haring, Félix González-Torres, David Wojnarowicz and the collective Gran Fury made visible the AIDS crisis in a time of government inaction.
We would have talked about how reports on the Civil War death count — totaling around 750,000 by recent estimates — filled newspapers, but photographs conveyed the cost of the conflict in a way nothing else could. “Let him who wishes to know what war is look at this series of illustrations,” Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in The Atlantic after photographs of the carnage went on view in Mathew Brady’s New York City gallery in 1862.
Courtesy of: The New York Times
