Corona Photos

My day job requires me to spend a lot of time looking through Getty Images. For the past few days, that's meant searching "coronavirus" and scrolling through hundreds of photos.

There are photos of blue and green and red shipping containers from Taipei in the Port of Los Angeles, the nation's busiest container port, which is seeing lots of ship cancellations.

There are photos of "disinfectant teams" cleaning historic sites. Istanbul's Grand Bazaar, with the team's reflections visible in the glass of a darkened store, their bodies mingling with the purses visible behind the glass. A lone police car, lights flashing, keeping watch on an otherwise abandoned plaza in Madrid.

There are photos of people in masks: Jair Bolsonaro, who either does or does not have coronavirus (I think he does but his son denies it, which caused a rare rift between the right-wing family and Fox News, who had reported Bolsonaro's son as confirming the positive test result). Someone waiting for the subway on the 34th Street platform in Manhattan. A USPS worker, delivering mail. NHS nurses waiting for a patient at a drive-through coronavirus testing site in Wolverhampton, England. A particularly eerie photo of what appears to be a transit worker standing on a train platform and looking directly at the camera, as a young passenger inside the crowded train, without a mask, stares at him. Italian mechanics at a garage, working on a cute little red European car (auto workers in the country recently went on strike to protect themselves against exposure to the virus). An Uber eats delivery bicyclist (I can't find the photo). That naked cowboy guy who hangs out in Times Square (in one photo, someone is in his arms; the disease can't get in the way of a good photo, I guess).

Empty airports in Japan, a police officer riding a Segway amid out-of-use lanes for directing passengers. Doctors in protective face masks and overalls taking a patient into a newly built temporary hospital in Rome. Empty meat shelves in a supermarket; empty toilet paper shelves in a supermarket.

Unless you read the caption of each photo, they could be any country. This thing's global; you can't escape it. Such a scale is definitionally hard to conceptualize, and indeed, I find myself getting dizzy trying to trace the supply chain impacts the virus is having on industries, travelling from China, to Italy, to Brazil, to New York. But here it is: the photos are just one country: illness. We all live here now, if we didn't already. Face the facts.

There are just so many photos, thousands up on Getty now. In "Photographs of Agony," John Berger wonders how photos of the Vietnam War could be published in capitalist mass media. Their effect "is not what what it was once presumed to be," he writes. Where we might assume horror gives rise to anti-war mobilization, Berger says the truth is the opposite. What the viewer experiences, after the shock of the photograph, is another shock, that of his own "moral inadequacy." As Deborah Nelson puts it, these photographs "operate like a traumatic event—that is, they take place out of time." "The picture becomes evidence of the general human condition," writes Berger, "It accuses nobody and everybody."

I'm not trying to compare a global pandemic to an imperialist war—for many reasons—but looking at photo after photo of this virus's effects, seeing it engulf more of the planet by the hour, and anticipating what genres of photo might emerge (bodies in hospital beds and graves, crying children, starving families), the feeling provoked is powerlessness, and bewilderment. Where are the pharmaceutical companies, the lean-production process, the gutting of hospitals, the crowding of prisons, the ultra-financialization and the superrich who benefited from it? What do we do?