Images of Empty Cities Shouldn’t Define This Pandemic
Empty streets are just one of the many portraits of a pandemic. They capture what’s gone, but not what remains.
On the same day a Navy hospital ship docked in the New York harbor to combat the spreading coronavirus pandemic, TikTok user Landon K. Gibson uploaded a haunting montage of the deserted streets of midtown Manhattan. Mozart’s “Requiem in D Minor” plays through the series of jump cuts: a subway surveillance camera pointed at an empty platform; ghostly theatre marquees for shows nobody’s watching; the dazzling lights of Times Square shining on deserted concrete.
The video, part of a new genre of media, already has millions of views. As cities around the world have required people to stay at home, forced businesses to close, and enforced physical distancing, photos of the deserted urban landscapes have proliferated on social media and news sites — an echo of the post-2008 recession “ruin porn” photography that gorged itself on the crumbling heart of American metropoles.
These are the other pictures of our pandemic, the reverse of the empty streetscapes: Pixelated faces arranged neatly in boxes on a screen.
