The Visual Cultures of the Virus

Abstract

On January 31, 2020, BBC news reported that SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) had “officially” arrived in the UK. The chief medical officer for England, Professor Chris Whitty, announced that two people in the city of York had tested positive for the virus. The pair received immediate treatment. They were moved from their temporary residence in York to a hospital in Hull. Two days later, they were transferred from Hull to an infectious disease unit at the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle. The patients, the BBC tells us, joined 83 Britons who were evacuated from Wuhan, China, the then center of the epidemic. The airplane carrying the evacuees had landed in England the very same day. What began on January 31, 2020 as a minor inconvenience will most likely end with the UK having the highest death rate in Europe, and the fourth highest per million of the population in the world: 147,433 people have died in the UK of Covid as of 22/12/21 and the number rises every day. In many respects, Covid, and the discourse that surrounds it, is the timeliest way to think about the socio-cultural and political relations of the image. Covid’s transformation from a regional problem into a global issue accelerates social, political, financial and ideological ruptures. These ruptures are performed against the backdrop of a reluctant, solidarity-governed populace and are propelled by the state. This ambivalence towards governmental and institutional control, exercised on behalf of the governed, is reflected in the association of the pandemic with dystopian visions where the state gradually becomes a technocracy. As the crisis surrounding the pandemic progresses, it deepens already existing socio-cultural and political divisions and, possibly, creates new ones. For example, research has shown that the implementation of preventative measures to stop spread, such as national lockdowns, have hit vulnerable groups of people hardest, exacerbating pre-existing socio-political inequalities. Not only are these groups at higher risk of contracting the disease due to their occupations, housing situations and other issues related to systemic discrimination, but they are also deprived of their livelihoods due to government-mandated lockdowns. Furthermore, Covid is described in academic and popular texts as “unprecedented” and is, without doubt, a crisis. But what kind of crisis is Covid? What do the images that surround it tell us about the current world in which we live? That is to say, what do these images reveal about