Pandemic: A Media Maker’s Perspective

by Guillermina Zabala Suárez 

 

This presentation explores the symbolism behind the visual narratives of the pandemic, as seen through the eyes of photographers from South America. How is the propagation of the virus—hidden and silent—revealed in photographs of the global pandemic? Mobility and immobility as a paradoxical equation and as a metaphor of the virus. In what ways does the sociopolitical and cultural context of these images inform their stories and expand their discourse beyond the physical territories?

 

Theoretical framework

 

The field of cultural studies will serve as a theoretical framework for this presentation. “What do the images want from us? Where are they leading us? What is that they lack, that they are inviting us to fill?” (Mitchell, W.J.T. What Do Pictures Want? 2005) These questions will be the guiding questions throughout my analysis.

 

“Photographs offered a far more democratic visual map of the world” in relation to other media (Mirzoeff, Nicholas. An Introduction to Visual Culture, 1999). This is relevant and true in the work of photojournalists who go to the heart of the conflict and capture reality as it unfolds. They often portray a narrative that contradicts the official and government-led narrative. I spoke with some of these photographers in order to find out how the pandemic affects their image-making practice and tests their notions of identity. 

 

Analysis of representational images 

 

The visual and thematic exploration of specific images will be divided into three themes that have been widely representational of the pandemic in its global perspective.

 

Isolation

 

Notes on Phone Screen series by Martín Zabala

 

This series explores the concept of confinement through the use of multiple framing techniques. The image of a family inside their home, inside the screen of a phone, that is inside somebody else's house represents an indication of the interconnectedness within confinement. Movement is merely representational as people are not physically moving but yet their digital representations are being transported through digital devices and throughout social media and the Internet. 

 

Notes on Window series by Martín Zabala

 

In his window series, Martin utilizes the physical framing of windows and iron bars in order to emphasize the idea of confinement and stillness. People are inside looking out. Time for reflection and introspection. Feelings of fear and desperation are real and being shared by the whole community. These images are motionless but yet bring a sense of connectedness that go beyond those windows frames.

 

Exposure

 

Note on a series by Natacha Pisarenko

 

This series captures crucial moments of first responders at hospitals and other places in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The imminent risk of being infected builds an imaginary wall reminding us of this new impossibility of movement and lack of “freedom.” 

 

The distance that we’re creating between us is real. But the urgency and the need to assist and cure the sick perseveres to the point of human sacrifice. Infected people are being moved to hospitals where many of them will die alone. They’re being transported to a new and strange place where they would live their bodies without the comfort of their loved ones. First responders move to hotel rooms or spend days and nights at the hospital, away from their families and loved ones. Their day-to-day routine has also been transformed and this “symbolic” migratory system has forced everyone to be stranded.

 

Collecting the dead

 

Notes on a series by Rodrigo Abd

 

In this series, Rodrigo explores one of the most difficult aspects of the pandemic: the dead bodies. Capturing emotional moments in isolated towns of Perú, Rodrigo brings out the notion of absence and solitude in the midst of fear and desperation. Community members are responsible for discharging the bodies of their loved ones. Some would have proper funerals and a time for mourning while others will be simply covered by a white sheet and placed in a plastic bag. Transporting these bodies throughout towns, mountains, and empty fields, community members seem to be exhausted and fearful of their own deaths. The symbolic sense of the migration process takes place within the act of passing. Death rituals have been truncated by the restrictions imposed by COVID-19. Nevertheless, family members mourn and pray for those who have “migrated” to the other side. 

 

Conclusion

 

Connecting back with Mitchell’s question: What images are inviting us to fill? These sets of images encapsulate, in my opinion, the paradoxical notion of immobility and mobility. Immobility is present in the lockdowns and a sense of isolation and mobility has been represented by the work of these photographers, propagation of the virus itself, the human interactions through digital devices, and death itself as a symbolic representation of movement with the act of passing.

 

A Sinha Fellow and a graduate student in Media Studies at The New School, Guillermina Zabala is a media artist, researcher, and educator whose work examines the intersection between the individual and their environment.

To view full presentation please go to: Pandemic: A Media Maker’s Perspective

 

 

Response to presentation

by Professor Sumita Chakravarty

 

Guillermina’s presentation introduces us to the photojournalistic work of some of her fellow Latin Americans who are also artists and photographers like herself. I felt privileged to be able to learn names of practitioners and to be shown glimpses of their reality through their images. She creates a typology of photos that capture different aspects of life as lived inside the pandemic, from the self-reflexive and experiential to the documentary and contextual. For her thematic link and organizational principle, Guillermina focuses on the duality that lies at the heart of pandemic media.

 

One notes the overarching duality of feeling that everything is at once global and local—the familiarity of images of sickness and death from across the world, at the same time that the minutiae the camera picks up point to the unequal resources that rich vs. poorer communities (and countries) are able to muster. There is the duality of presence and absence that she identifies, mostly in terms of social relations that are stalled in times of quarantine. The third duality lies in what is inside and outside the frame, for there are multiple frames that shape the spatial dynamics of subject and photographer alike. Finally, informing all of the ones mentioned, is the tension between mobility and immobility, an encompassing metaphor for pandemic media which push the boundaries of the terms themselves by associating mobility with death and immobility with repetitive routines. 

 

There is, of course, a long association of photography with mourning, trauma, and death, but I am struck by how these photos are celebrations, even amidst the pain and loss that they document, of community and kindness, not just those of first responders, but the ones that show two people keeping each other company in their solitude, or the group that carries a coffin in rugged terrain, or the person whose domestic possessions take on a kind of presence. So on the one hand we are witnessing from the outside closed and inaccessible places, but on the other, they suggest a network of connections, what might be called an effective infrastructure of support during troubled times. These images are quietly reflective, and above all, seem to suggest solidarity and survival. It is a theme that runs through all the presentations—of infrastructures not as closed systems but as living and breathing entities that may signal renewal.

 

I have 2 questions or responses for further thought, one cultural, the other theoretical.

1. What constitutes Latin American visuality? Into what traditions of image-making might these be placed, either in terms of crisis photography or as witnessing and collective catharsis? For non-native viewers, documentary images from Latin America often invoke a history of the disappeared, of the faces of bloody dictators, of armed uprisings, of a body optics of violence and desecration.

 

At the same time, I am reminded of the enormously rich archives of literary and cinematic movements that have arisen from the region, whether it is ‘magic realism’ or the articulation of ‘third cinema’, ‘the cinema of underdevelopment’ or a succession of Latin American new waves. These powerful political and creative practices gave us a new vocabulary, new ways of thinking about nations and cultures, histories and identities.
I am wondering how contemporary photojournalists inhabit this tradition, what departures mark their view of the world, and how their work is received in their own countries. Do native viewers see things that I can’t see, backstories of resistance and resilience forged under repeated social and political crises?  

 

2.  Keeping the focus on Latin America, my second question relates to the vexed debate in photography and photojournalism about the presence of art in documentary practice, and I wonder how current practitioners approach this stricture. One recalls Susan Sontag’s blistering critique of the Brazilian photographer Sebastian Salgado’s images of global migration which she thought were too stylized or aestheticized, and therefore lacked the immediacy of grief or an incitement to action. In a recent rebuttal of that argument that I read, the author notes,

 

“Photography is a technology used, among other things, to ‘amplify’ our own imagination and to ‘incite’ the imaginings of others. Like photographic depictions more generally, Salgado’s work allows us . . . to imagine actual but quite alien states of the world and, simultaneously, to see ourselves doing so” (James Johnson, “The Arithmetic of Compassion: Rethinking the Politics of Photography,” British Journal of Political Science. Vol. 41, No. 3 (JULY 2011), pp. 621-643; cites Patrick Maynard, The Engine of Visualization, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997). 

 

Although this pandemic is not alien to anyone in the way images of displacement are to many people, our imaginations are still in need of amplification. I think in today’s world this comes by way of the solidarity created in the photographs we saw. In an essay titled “Visuality as Infrastructure,” Adriana Campos Johnson notes that the visual—particularly the visuality of news photographs, has long been associated with a faithful adherence to the referent. This is how I think Sontag perceived the failures of photography as unable to render the sociopolitical reality before the camera lens. Johnson advances a different conception of the visual that draws on contemporary theorizing about infrastructures. For her, images and audiovisual media are the means of cabling society; they create circuitries of connection. Bypassing representational theories, she thinks that the changed historical conditions of visuality call for a new approach, noting:

 

“the multiplication, expansion, and thickening of visual forms as well as their increasing centrality to social, economic, and political processes[,] so that we might want to talk about visual forms as a critical infrastructure of global capitalism, an oil pipeline rather than a dirt road.” (p. 78)

 

I find these observations to be very helpful in understanding the work that images we saw of the pandemic are doing. As infrastructures that implicate our bodies and our senses, they have the potential to create structures of solidarity across cultures and communities.