The COVID19 pandemic is truly a harrowing time for some. Around the world, families are losing their income, people are losing their home and loved ones, health insurance and financial security are being ripped away, and mental health is on a general decline from isolation. Back in the global Spanish Flu Pandemic of 1918, industrial production and consumption slowed dramatically,but it picked back up within a year to be higher and faster-paced than it ever had been before; “In 1918, influenza had a far greater effect on worldwide trends in industry, production and consumption than the first world war… Yet today when we look back at demographic and economic trends, that last great pandemic appears as a small blip with few long-term consequences” (Dorling, 2020). However, in the same Guardian article by Dorling, the current economy is described to be in a ‘slowdown’. The economy hasn’t been accelerating and growing, even prior to this pandemic. We just haven’t noticed because until now, it has been almost unnoticeable.
The news of the pandemic is full of images of healthcare workers with nearly bloody lines cut into their faces from wearing masks for hours on end. There are images of protesters, and protesters protesting the other protest. Images of truckers and grocery store workers sleeping in their cars or garages so as to not infect their families. Images of doctors crying outside of hospitals, and family waving through glass panes. Photographs of people who have lost their jobs, of farmers having to destroy their produce. Shelves empty, production assembly lines halted, city centers as ghost towns. It is these images that we will think of when we remember this pandemic. These images are haunting, they show people struggling, and they often evoke images we see from times of war or the great depression. In the book No Caption Needed, Robert Hairman and John Louis Lucaites, discuss the way tragic photographs make issues personal, “By activating this deep register of moral response, the photograph coun- teracts the conventional political realism that places war and international relations generally outside the moral circumference of domestic politics” (Hairman et al., 178). This is interesting, because it is important in how we move forward from the pandemic. If we focus our visual energy on the people the pandemic is harming, the people who have lost jobs and the tired faces of essential workers, we make the tragedy about the people still living. We cannot afford to focus on showing images of the virus or images of the people it has claimed. That wouldn’t allow us to work towards a healthier future. In this way, iconic photographs can be understood to be drivers of narrative, or catalysts. When done correctly, they push progress and care forward, and lessen the powerless feeling of a truly apocalyptic narrative where people choose to do nothing.
Moving forward, these images will be important to keep in mind, as it seems we have a slow path towards economic recovery and may not return to acceleration; “since the 1930s, technological change has slowed; the rate of economic growth has slowed every decade after the 1950s; population growth similarly has slowed since before the 1970s; and since at least the 1990s we have started to behave more like our parents again. By the 2010s we (at least in the rich world) were no longer seeing each generation better-off than the one before” (Dorling, 2020). This slowdown, and change is a good thing. The rate we were moving at, and we expected to continue moving at was not sustainable. Not sustainable for our planet, or for our country. To conclude, the pandemic and the chilling photographs of life at a standstill, may allow tragedy to be turned into optimism; “Everything was slowing down already, everything will still slow down when the current crisis ends. But the slamming on of the brakes on the train we were travelling on might, at the very least, wake us out of our stupor” (Dorling, 2020). The pause was necessary.
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