Photographs from a Pandemic

“An event known through photographs becomes more real. But after repeated exposure to images it becomes less real.”

- Susan Sontag (On Photography)

Mourning calls . It is what I have come to call them secretly.

For the past few weeks, the phone calls my mother calls in and receives from relatives have become affixed morning rituals; To get notified of the dead and the dying. With COVID-19, the yearly call of ‘death’ and remembrance has been replaced with more urgent monthly calls, often even daily, of anxieties and apprehensions.

Those then gone are resurrected in our memories of old, and new. And those struggling are obviously forgotten as soon as they recover. Maybe there’s only so much a heart can hold at once.

In this last month, Delhi alone has witnessed a daily average of Covid cases of around 20,000. This of course is far below the accurate numbers. The deaths so far have been more than 18,000 ( again, not accurate!). Largely the faultlines have revealed themselves to be a collapsing health infrastructure, under-funded and under-staffed in a country that prides itself as third in the world at highest military spending. Our government’s attention at the moment is spent on building itself a palace, encouraging crowds, among other things.

For the rest of us, there is grief. The grief is personal. The grief is public. The grief is perpetual.

Even with so much death around each one of us. It is the incredulity of it that never surpasses. It retains a sense of novelty each time it happens. The ritual of grieving always begins at ‘Shock!’. And the pandemic has only been punctuated by such shocks since it began. Some of them have lasted a few days, months. Some will last us for a lifetime.

We live in an image-world, at heightened moments of social-distancing and isolation. This means that the reality of the crisis comes ‘perceived’ as through digital images, photographs on-line posted invariably by photojournalists and citizens (or netizens!) alike. The face of the pandemic is in its multiplicity. Multiple faces of people known, and unknown, have become Ghosts of cyberspace, of the image-world. At their undignified moments of dying and death, their partners, children stooped over, hold them and grieve in public. The rest of us, spectators watch the spectacle. The Danse Macabre.

In the book, On Photography (1977), Susan Sontag outlines the ‘perverse’ nature of viewing images. She highlights disturbing insights,

“The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings, just as the surprise and bemusement felt the first time one sees a pornographic movie wear off after one sees a few more. The vast photographic catalog of misery and injustice throughout the world has given everyone a certain familiarity with atrocity, making the horrible seem more ordinary — making it appear familiar, remote (“it’s only a photograph”), inevitable.”

Sontag wrote in the context of War and other forms of violence that plagued until that time in the 1970s. The years since she wrote this, digital technology has broken into our lives in unimaginable ways. This pandemic is unprecedented in the way the images have been photographed, distributed and consumed across social media platforms by millions at home. Could all of this image-consumption possibly lead to what’s termed as ‘compassion fatigue’?

Sontag writes,

“In these last decades, “concerned” photography has done at least as much to deaden conscience as to arouse it.”

Given the consumption of these images online, a private ritual of ‘death’ has become publicised, indiscriminately distributed, not unlike the statistics that follow. Led by the modern phenomena of ‘doom scrolling’, perhaps those even keeping abreast of news with good intentions have led themselves into emotional fatigue as spectators of this spectacle. This is then more often than not further exacerbated by the deaths and illnesses of those in their own families and friend circles.

Why then can’t we stop scrolling?

Sontag explains how industrial societies turn us into ‘image junkies’, our realities are confirmed by these photographs . More so since, social distancing, state imposed lockdowns have ensured for most to remain at home. Unlike the frontline workers, we are then only ‘exposed’ to the information through the images we consume online through social media. These repetitive yet differing images, are marked by repetitive symbolic figures, of funeral pyres, oxygen tanks, bodies, mournings, and exhausted frontline workers. This has confirmed our fears of what will greet us if we were to step out. The ‘muteness’ of these photographs corroborated by personal losses, experiences — especially, in case of cremations, hospital beds — has led one to an overhaul of fear response, increasing anxiety. It continually confirms the reality of the fears we live with in our homes.

But then again for some these photographs have also lost the ‘emotional charge’ they might have first held. Staggering reports and accounts of those have come up who have refused to believe it to be real!

We live in an image-choked world so there is no turning our backs on what unfolds ahead. The true value perhaps of these photographic images lie in being held as evidence, as some form of ‘proof’ for the horrors wrought by the pandemic, and in most cases the State, like our very own BJP-RSS government.

As for the rest of us, this could mean our ante of what’s atrocious would keep growing. Could this probably mean we’d become less empathetic over years? Very Likely. Our mental abilities could very well become corrupted, according to Sontag and many others.

But this doesn’t diminish the grief of loss we’d experience of a loved one. Does it? In one of the articles online, a daughter claims how a ‘private’ funeral rite, of cremation, has become a ‘spectacle’. And yet, there also are photographs shared online of those who passed away, with elaborate details of who they were. These texts, along with photographs, from birthdays, family albums reiterate the loss as not statistical, or incase of photojournalism — repetitive and endless, but as singular and profoundly felt. It retains a sense of novelty that it imparts from them to the spectator.

On the facebook wall of one of my aunts, someone has written a post about her fondness for lehariya sarees. A small detail that caught my attention. Another, on an old custodian of Old Delhi, Haji Miyan, whom we met for our film, comes with long details from a young man on how generous he was as ‘host’ to his father. Yes, for us too. Then there’s one of someone’s grandmother. Another of a historian’s friend where they are arms in arms laughing. Small significant details.

Maybe our ability to feel cannot be reduced, and if the society we live in becomes more atrocious, capitalistic and industrialized, maybe we’d still find ways to resist. Perhaps, a small insignificant detail, will still move us. Sontag recounts, from the Vietnamese War of 1972, a photograph of a young Vietnamese child that was on the front page of most newspapers in the world. This photograph, a searing image of the atrocity of war, is what was remembered and recounted in the criticism of the American State instead of hours of televised barbarities. The nature of the pandemic has been described as war-like, the images shared of mass crematoriums are shocking. The American magazine, Time, on its front-cover shared one of the mass-cremation photographs. Widely shared, it retained a sense of ‘shock’ even for me, but over the weeks, as cremations continue, I am not moved by it. What does still shock me, are the personal memoirs, personal losses. Long paragraphs of lives short-lived, immensely loved by those around. And, Faces. Multiple. Always, New. Always, searing.