Did You Get
The Shot?

“How can one mourn something they weren’t supposed to see?” visual studies scholar Kimberly Juanita Brown asked her Zoom audience. In a keynote she delivered on February 11th, 2021, Brown described the relative absence of Black Union soldiers in historical and visual archives. With the knowledge of that archival absence, you’re attempting to look at an image—the capturing of a scene, a moment, a figure, a sentiment—that unquestionably existed but is deliberately kept from sight.

It’s been over a year since the United States’ first reported COVID-19 death on February 29th in Washington—over a year of trying to catch our collective breaths in the relentless deluge of fatalities and gross state negligence-incompetence and everyday disruption. As this novel coronavirus eventually becomes a managed part of our epidemiological landscape like the now-endemic influenza virus, I wonder how we will remember these tumultuous earlier years with an absence of images. I’m setting out to excavate the invisible, and in particular, the constraints that have defined how this pandemic is (or is not) seen, as well as the historical ethics of photography that have preceded it.

We have photographs of responses to the virus. There are images of queues of all kinds: socially distanced grocery store lines, drive-in testing arrangements in parking lots, uncountable numbers of people waiting outside of unemployment offices and food banks for hours. There are pictures of unmasked right-wing anti-lockdown protests, militia group members storming state capitols, and even a white riot at the nation’s Capitol just six days into the new year we’d swore couldn’t be as chaotic as the previous. The conspicuous absence, of course, is in the capturing of mortality. Last year, art historian Sarah Elizabeth Lewis asked us: “What are we missing by not having images that represent the full impact of the dead and dying?”

I am struggling to comprehend the crossed casualty count of over half a million COVID-19 deaths in the United States in one year; others clearly are as well, given attempts by the Washington Post to translate 500,000 into vernacular measurements (including a 95-mile caravan of 9,804 45-foot intercity buses each seating 51 people) or Daily Beast comparing death tolls to the populations of metropolitan cities. But would an unobstructed engagement with death—from being able to attend in-person funerals and “properly” mourn to being able to witness our loved one’s last breaths in the hospital—make these deaths less unfathomable?

Some media emerged from the early days of catastrophe in Italy: patients on ventilators gasping for air, priests blessing rows of caskets in empty churches, emptied cobblestone streets in old cities evocative of the medieval plague. Yet, as Lewis reminds, medical privacy laws effectively bar us from this intimate in-hospital viewing, and we are left with an overwhelming data structure reporting rapidly climbing line graphs and “thousands dead a day” headline counts and interactive online obituaries. “What are the words to speak to and disrupt the disaster’s expected and intended, accelerated and unequally distributed rates of mortality?” implores Christina Sharpe. We can quantify collective loss of this magnitude far more easily than we can actually grasp the quantification: there is a disquieting opacity to the global scale of human suffering that photography attempts to make legible.

These moments happen as we are forced to mourn in relative seclusion—Jude Wanga described her father’s digital funeral as “pixelation” in the stead of warm embrace, an already painful emotional distress interrupted by a “disjointed and stuttered” mourning. A “complicated grief” in medical diagnostic terms, a trauma in human ones. In a way, these barriers to proximity, to physical closeness, have also stolen our ability to bear witness.

In her landmark text Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag contends that photographs of war “are a means of making ‘real’ (or ‘more real’) matter that the privileged and merely safe might prefer to ignore.” But out of respect for the deceased, photographers refrain from capturing their faces, a contemporarily ethical protection for the dead’s dignity, but perhaps also a kind of moral-spiritual superstition that the eyes are a window to the soul and we capture and visually eternalize soullessness.

In a kind of rebuttal to her claim that images assist with the marking and stipulating of importance in our collective memory, John Berger’s short essay “Photographs of Agony” describes the visual encounter with representations of extreme suffering as “arresting”—as initiating a kind of directionless despair rather than action-inspiring indignation (the argument here is that photographs might compel deniers or otherwise inconsiderate people to treat the virus with due seriousness). At an affective level, would the images help us to grieve or would we, as Berger charges, resume our lives in ways that are “hopelessly inadequate” in attempting to assimilate what we have witnessed?

We are attempting to convey, interpret, and internalize the incommensurable: caught between the atrocity image of viral disease and painful death and the almost impossible to fully comprehend calculations and projections of hospitalizations, infections, and death that inform and dehumanize in equal measure. What mediums of comprehension remain, and what are our collective social responsibilities in bearing witness and mourning? Are we able to communicate the scale of trauma without being forced to use the dehumanization of enumeration?

At the beginning of March 2020, Italian actor Luca Franzese shared his late sister Teresa’s posthumous COVID-19 diagnosis. He had been stuck quarantining in his home with his family and her dead body for nearly 36 hours because funerary services hadn’t come to collect it. He spoke tearfully and forcefully in a video posted to Facebook about being abandoned by state authorities—she was the first Italian to die at home, according to local councilor Francesco Emilio Borrelli, and there was uncertainty with how to proceed. She was finally picked up by a funeral home following the video’s viral spread; none of her family members were present at her burial.

From war and famine to everyday banalities, the photographic image is a verification. It serves as its own kind of empirics: it is the ultimate evidential material of a phenomenon, its incontestable power animating the maxim “to see is to believe.” It is no surprise that units of photographers followed Allied troops’ liberation of Nazi concentration camps—they made internationally visible the concentration camp atrocities of industrialized genocidal killing. Despite the proof it offers, a photo is still a fraught metric in this post-truth moment in which a wholly undoctored image may be less common than not. With the meeting of the increasing seriousness afforded to the selfie as a medium of legitimate expression, and the instantaneous international broadcast ability of social media, the genre of the informalized COVID-19 testimonial has partly come to inhabit the visual narrative vacuum usually held by photojournalism.

There seem to be two broad categories of these dispatches. First is a more standard informational selfie or TikTok video. They describe tips of symptom differentiation (is it a cold, the flu, allergies, or COVID-19?) and symptom management, like reminders to stay hydrated, sleep on your stomach, and to take acetaminophen (Tylenol) rather than ibuprofen (Advil) for fever. They offer descriptions, recollections, and visualizations of illness or hospitalization, such as testimonials of lingering symptoms from at-home long-haulers and bedside updates with people fitted with nasal cannula. There are celebratory accounts of vaccinations and hospital discharges or recovery, as with R&B singer Jeremih, who recovered weeks after being placed on a ventilator in a Chicago hospital.

Some are particularly haunting, like the video made by a 34-year-old unnamed patient in Hyderabad, India who died prior to the circulation of a viral video in which he claimed negligent treatment. He describes his ventilator’s premature removal and his heart beginning to stop: “Bye daddy, bye everyone” are his last utterances before the video’s end.

More unnerving than this is the second category: the COVID-19 cautionary tale. The COVID-19 cautionary tales are mostly now-ubiquitous images of weary and exhausted (and exalted as heroes) frontline workers. With hospital access that the majority of the population does not have, these medical staffers wearing horrifyingly inadequate protective equipment, or with mask-indented faces, describe their overwhelming caseloads while appealing for better, safer government resources. There’s also Los Angeles County-based Dr. Scott Kobner, who, armed with his Leica cameras, captured the battlefield of emergency medicine’s war against the surge of cases in California, and especially in Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Times placed his work into a historical tradition of Civil War and World War I-era medical photography, although his photographs are markedly less gruesome than the carnage regularly featured in wartime images—an absence unique to the present. A less common and slightly darker complement are the reformed COVID-19 hoaxers. It’s a riff off of classic confessional forms where people would take to social media to confess how infection made them into COVID-19 believers; sometimes it’s a health worker relaying the sentiment of a late patient.

Influencer culture, with its starved quest for engagement, has kind of cheapened the earnestness of these confessionals as illustrated by Gen-Z internet stars’ apologetic vlogs about careless partying (James Charles) and vulnerable acknowledgements about positive test results (Tanner Fox). Social media platforms tether self-expression with a flexible social control through the production of branded (i.e. somehow unique) personas. This sets the terms of digital interaction and intimacies leading many people with large platforms to rely on algorithmic dissemination and audience response as a gauge for sharing about themselves. The 33-year-old Ukrainian fitness influencer Dmitriy Stuzhuk died in the hospital in October after contracting the virus on a trip to Turkey. His final and most-liked post, a precedented spectacle of self-expression in unprecedented times, shows him shirtless and tanned in his bed on day eight of his hospital stay; his muscled arm is flexed and nonchalantly posed behind his head and a breathing device is affixed over his nose and mouth. It’s surreal. His caption is long and reads eerily like a deathbed confession as he admits his disregard of the virus and warns his then-over one million followers that COVID-19 is “heavy.” He is serious but optimistic that he’ll finish his treatment at home. The second image is him flashing a peace sign. The caption reads: “My condition is stable.”

As COVID-19 was ravaging Europe and the United States, the African continent seemed to be “spared,” a phenomenon confusing and frustrating in equal measure. Quickly, ideas began to circulate about African “immunity” or the possibility that the virus was vulnerable to the temperatures of warmer climates. While there was outcry about Trump’s ban against European Union and then British travelers—a practical public health measure jarringly initiated by a pronounced Sinophobic xenophobe—the travel patterns between Africa and viral hotspots weren’t similarly understood as a functional ban.

The pandemic has offered countless opportunities for analogy with AIDS in the 1980s, but the invocations have been glaringly Americentric. Just as the early spread of HIV occurred along colonial trade and transport networks in the Congo, the introduction of COVID-19 to Africa likewise followed a unidirectional flow of free movement. The virus is border-promiscuous. Medical anthropologist Adia Benton reminds us that “viruses move in bodies, and the freedom of certain bodies, certain people to move across borders needs to be acknowledged.”

Often, photography is used to illuminate a particular lack: in the case of the present pandemic, photographs would show the human cost of state negligence. To use the AIDS panic of the 1980s as a historical parallel requires us to audit our understanding of victimization and how the gaze of the audience and photographers alike was a negotiation of marginality. No one was invulnerable to HIV, yet the sick most frequently seen were initially, and overwhelmingly, people who were Black, queer, poor, or drug users (or any combination of the four). Visualizing suffering produces and drives an empathy for sufferers, but to returning to Brown, photographic humanitarianism also produces an affective distancing between the self and witnessed suffering. “When we look at images of the dead,” Brown writes in her aptly titled essay “Regarding the Pain of the Other,” “there is an instant visual negotiation…that interprets the collective nature of racial exclusion, and one that tells us who belongs on the outside of the human family, waiting to get in.”

The incongruent first waves of the pandemic in the western world and the continent (save for South Africa) denied us the familiar reassurance that they have it worse than we do, an imbalance quickly righted by vaccine colonialism. Widely proliferated and often intrusive photographs from past Ebola outbreaks—workers in hazmat suits carrying corpses on stretchers, dying people in hospital isolation chambers, the disinfecting and burning of dead bodies—reified now-mundane characterizations of the Dark Continent as a birthplace for death and infectious disease. Our insistence that the COVID-19 dead shouldn’t be photographed, that they’re owed privacy and dignity in death and dying, proves a hypocrisy and conceit in photojournalism: that there are, in fact, subjects whose consent is necessary prior to being photographed.

The novel coronavirus has effectively and undeniably exposed the twinned crises of racial capitalism and neoliberalism: the decades of public policy that racially segregated public housing, privatized and tethered healthcare to employment, undermined collective bargaining and scrapped labor protections for the oft disrespected and underpaid laborers suddenly understood as and rhetorically promoted to “essential” workforces. In this country, it is Latinx, Black, indigenous, disabled and chronically ill, elderly, and poor people who are being left to die. European modernity has always been the primary site and source of atrocity. But if the objective of this photographic genre is to create images from which we can distance ourselves in order to project and reflect upon our moral code, the images that we lack—effectively autoportraits—would be far too revealing.

The opposite of survivor’s guilt is survivor’s gloat. Where a kind of pleasure and social-personal necessity is derived from consuming certain kinds of suffering (e.g. videos of killings by police), a certain self-exceptionalism can emerge from the witnessing of others: a fear transmuted into a personally held or articulated confidence that you wouldn’t or couldn’t succumb to the same fate. The proliferation of and easy access to photographs has not made us more aware or empathetic, very much the opposite. There is little anonymized atrocity we have not seen or could not easily see, few visuals whose affect can disintegrate the callous of entrenched social hierarchies and accepted suffering. I don’t believe there are any visual aids that would express the inexpressibility of this kind of atrocity and facilitate a proper and full mourning of the dead, none at all.

Zoé Samudzi is a writer whose work has appeared in Art in America, The New Republic, The New Inquiry, Jewish Currents, and other spaces.