Photographic narratives of Covid-19 during Spain's state of emergency: images of death, dying and grief

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cmrt20 Mortality Promoting the interdisciplinary study of death and dying ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cmrt20 Photographic narratives of Covid-19 during Spain’s state of emergency: images of death, dying and grief Montse Morcate & Rebeca Pardo To cite this article: Montse Morcate & Rebeca Pardo (2022) Photographic narratives of Covid-19 during Spain’s state of emergency: images of death, dying and grief, Mortality, 27:4, 426-442, DOI: 10.1080/13576275.2022.2141206 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13576275.2022.2141206 © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Published online: 21 Nov 2022. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 507 View related articles View Crossmark data Citing articles: 2 View citing articles Photographic narratives of Covid-19 during Spain’s state of emergency: images of death, dying and grief Montse Morcate a and Rebeca Pardo b a Department of Visual Arts and Design, Faculty of Fine Arts, Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain; b Department of Audiovisual Communication, Faculty of Communication Sciences, Universitat Internacional de Catalunya, Barcelona Spain ABSTRACT Covid-19 is the first pandemic to be broadcast and photographed as it happens worldwide. However, despite the plethora of images on countless aspects of the pandemic, few media images have covered its more sensitive issues, such as the collapse of the healthcare system, the process of dying alone, or the disruption to funeral rites and mourning. Consequently, the visual narratives of the pandemic are biased. They lack images that show its more dramatic aspects. This affects not only how the public perceives and reacts to Covid-19, but also the visual evidence that will remain for historical memory in the future. With one of the world’s highest case rates and most stringent states of emergency, Spain offers an interesting case study to analyse the pandemic’s photographic narratives and its missing images during lockdown. This paper focuses on the presence or absence of images dealing with illness, death, dying and grief, as well as their ways of representation. It delves into the framing of particular visual narratives through an analysis of the images that appeared in Spain’s leading newspapers, together with semi-structured interviews conducted with renowned photojournalists who worked on the front line to document Covid-19 during lockdown. KEYWORDS Illness narratives; Covid-19; death; grief; epidemic photography; photojournalism Introduction The Covid-19 pandemic has become the most significant historical event of recent decades because of its enormous social and economic impact, and the chaos it has presented to health care systems worldwide. Despite the shock triggered by the arrival of Covid-19, pandemics are neither a new nor an extraordinary human phenomenon, especially in countries that do not have the resources or support needed to combat disease. Epidemics and pandemics are a silent, latent reality that periodically appear, challenging the limits of the human capacity to face death when they do so. In the grip of a pandemic, humans create new narratives, new metaphors and even new language to understand and control it, not only from a purely technical or healthcare perspective, but in the social arena too. In this respect, the arrival of Covid-19 coincides with an extraordinary moment of globalisation in communications and the circulation of images. With CONTACT Montse Morcate [email protected] Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain MORTALITY 2022, VOL. 27, NO. 4, 426–442 https://doi.org/10.1080/13576275.2022.2141206 © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. the internet, social media, smartphone photography and connectivity, a significant portion of the population now live through the lens, constantly taking and sharing images (Lister, 2013). The images that have reached our screens from the outside world, particularly during lockdown, form the basis of our collective story and our future collective memory. With Covid-19, this has all occurred in a communication context that critics have described as an ‘infodemic’. Pardo proposes the new term ‘photodemic’ (2020a) to capture the flood of images that mix together depictions of life during lockdown, concerts on balconies and instances of autofiction with other images of healthcare professionals, politicians, the media. The term also takes in memes and images manipulated from other pandemics or crises. The phenomenon of the photodemic marks a major difference with preceding pandemics, and is arguably distinct from what Lynteris (2020) has identified as ‘epidemic photography’. While the Covid-19 pandemic is one of the most photographed and documented events in history, there has been a marked absence or limited presence of images showing its starker aspects. From early on in the pandemic, questions have been asked about the absence of such images (Lewis, 2020; Pardo, 2020a, 2020b). In answer to such questions, this article seeks to focus on an analysis of the typology and presence of images depicting illness, dying, death and grief that have been produced and published in the Spanish media by professional photographers during lockdown. Our aim is to contribute to an analysis of the visualisation of death and dying during Covid-19, firstly, by looking at the role played by photojournalists in making the toll of the pandemic visible, and, secondly, through an examination of the narratives subsequently constructed about the pandemic. While there is still a debate about the appearance of images of death in the media owing to important differences between the degree and kind of representation of natural death as opposed to violent death, scholars tend to agree that images of death seldom appear in the media, particularly explicit images (Aaron, 2014; Hanusch, 2008, 2010, 2013; Walter et al., 1995). Accordingly, our initial hypothesis was that there would be a low visual representation of the most serious aspects of the pandemic as a result of a certain degree of censorship over the images by editors of newspapers and/or by the photographers themselves. To this end, we have identified all images published in the three Spanish newspapers analysed during the strictest phase of lockdown and examined their potential influence on the visual narratives being generated about Covid-19. Notably, the paper focuses on the Spanish print media. Spain was one of the countries hardest hit by the first wave of the pandemic and underwent one of the most stringent lockdowns. The analysed period is of particular interest because of the major role played by images as a tool of communication and contact while the public remained isolated at home. The period under scrutiny, which begins with the declaration of a state of emergency (March 14 th , 2020) and ends with the start of de-escalation (29 th April 2020), spans the most significant period of the pandemic at an informational and societal level. It is also a period marked by the creation of the first visual narratives of the pandemic, in which the presence (or absence) and typology of images that revealed the severity of illness and dying contributed not only to showing (or not showing) what was actually happening, but also to creating public opinion and responses to the pandemic. For the object of analysis, we have selected the three most prominent general-interest newspapers in Spain: El País, El Mundo and La Vanguardia. In addition, the paper draws on the accounts of photojournalists of major renown and MORTALITY 427 standing in Spain in order to include front-line testimony that can help to identify the agents and circumstances behind the visual narratives in question. While other scholars have analysed the Spanish press during the pandemic, they have focused on front-page headlines (Monjas et al., 2020; Núñez-Gómez et al., 2020) or on a case study based on a limited number of specific images published by diverse media outlets (Freixa and Redondo-Arolas, 2021). By contrast, the present study delves into graphic representation more broadly by individually and jointly analysing the quantity, typology and focus of images published about the pandemic, and by comparing and contrasting the collected data with the comments of photojournalists who produced the images. This article, and the study it is based on, seeks to contribute to a better understanding of the presence and/or absence of images of death and dying as a result of illness – as distinct from the representation of violent death resulting from non-medical causes. Theoretical framework Presences and absences in the photographic representation of death, dying and grief The photographic representation of death and dying has been present since the emergence of the medium. Changing attitudes to death and grief have been reflected in the changing nature and use of images of death and dying (Walter, 2015). So too have the uses and values given to the photographic image changed – for instance the particular intensity of the post-mortem image in the domestic sphere during the medium’s early decades (Morcate & Pardo, 2019; Morcate, 2012; Ruby, 1995). While images of a loved one’s body in death and of the funerals of ordinary people have become increasingly rare in family archives, the visibility of images of state funerals and funerals of major public figures has become normalised in the media (Morcate & Pardo, 2019; Sumiala, 2013). Death and grief have become particularly visible on the internet (Pardo & Morcate, 2016), with particular emphasis on memorialisation and grief. This new prevalence and intensity has contributed to the re-normalisation of images death, grief and mourning. According to Lynteris (2020), the use of photography has also been central to the way in which the public has experienced the most recent pandemics/ epidemics of the twenty-first century. For Lynteris, the new genre of epidemic photography began to take root with the publication of the first photos of an epidemic at the end of the nineteenth century (the third global wave of bubonic plague). In light of medical photography that depicted symptoms, patients and methods of treatment, Lynteris (2020) notes that photographers began to document and visualise not only the disease-afflicted but the wider social, cultural and material contexts of epidemic. Lynteris identifies various categories of images in the press that also depicted the measures being adopted for the control and containment of disease: fumigation, disinfection and vaccination. Lynteris additionally highlights the documentation of burial rites as purported sources of infection. For Lynteris, press images have played a key role in the very transformation of the idea of ‘pandemic’ from an ancient term found only in medical dictionaries to a word on everyone’s lips. 428 M. MORCATE AND R. PARDO Moeller has also identified the use of certain visual metaphors, namely ‘science-fiction metaphors, animal metaphors, crime, detective or mystery metaphors, apocalyptic metaphors and military metaphors’ (Moeller, 1999, p. 64), which largely reappear in the visual narrative of Covid-19. To understand the variety of coverage and the visual ‘tones’ at play in the representation of illness and pandemics, Moeller stresses a number of variables like the novelty of the disease or virus, the violence of the epidemic in terms of its symptoms, and the scope of its geographical and social impact. She proposes six categories of images: hard-science images; images of animals to illustrate the origin of the illness; images of people in PPE (to convey the idea of contagion); images of victims or their medical conditions; images of death, of burials and of funerals that establish the deadly consequences of illness; and images of the disinfection of spaces to communicate strategies of epidemic control (Moeller, 1999, p. 66). To gain a better understanding of images of illness, it is useful to note the humanist turn that took place at the end of the twentieth century in storytelling and in what have come to be known as illness narratives (Frank, 1995; Kleinman, 1988) written by authors who have put value on patients and their stories. This has had a clear impact on the agency of patients, a growing realisation of their rights and the need for greater awareness. The changing shape of literary narratives of illness (for an overview, see Hydén, 1997) has coincided with a transformation in the visual narratives of illness (Morcate & Pardo, 2019). To contextualise press images, Chouliaraki (2006) establishes three discourses of news (related to the regimes of pity that she identifies): adventure news, emergency news and ecstatic news. Each discourse involves differing degrees of emotional and moral involvement from the spectator. In his study on the representation of the SARS pandemic, Stijn Joye adds a fourth category; one that is particularly useful for the present study: the category of neglected news (2010, p. 589). With this term, Joye points to the ideological and political implications of the absence of particular news items (and, by extension, the absence of particular images). Disasters exist for most people only if they are present in the media (Joye, 2010, p. 593). As Richardson points out (Richardson, 2007, p. 93), it is necessary to recognise that events are communicated as much by absence as by presence, so that what is lost or excluded also carries meaning and shapes narrative. Chouliaraki (2010) and Campbell (2004) argue that it is necessary to understand the cultural context in which images of death are taken, distributed and published if the full connotation of such images, and their meanings, is to be grasped. Sontag (2003/2007) and Moeller (1999) have both observed that there is a predisposition to show culturally distanced death and suffering, whereas special care is given to victims who feel closer to home. Sontag (2003/2007) has raised the question of whether images affect us more if they show ‘our people’, emphasising that images of our own dead are not like images of the dead of others, because they are even harder to bear and accept. Hanusch (2008) puts greater stress on the predisposition of daily newspapers to offer information that is relevant to the public, and ‘relatable’. The globalised scope and impact of the pandemic has made starkly visible countless, varied processes of loss, both primary and secondary, in every realm of human life, emotions and the economy (Zhai & Du, 2020), turning grief into the most everyday element of life amid the pandemic. It has given rise to ‘new MORTALITY 429 geographies of death’ (Maddrell, 2020) in which many individuals have been abandoned to their fate in elder care facilities, hospitals or the streets; and in which many have died totally alone and/or have been buried with nobody in attendance save for funeral staff, often in mass graves, without respecting either the last wishes of the deceased or the grief of survivors. Healthcare personnel have experienced ‘exhaustion due to heavy workloads and protective gear, fear of becoming infected and infecting others, feeling powerless to handle patients’ conditions, accompanied by a sense of being fully responsible for patients’ wellbeing’ (Chochinov et al., 2020). As a result, millions of people have simultaneously undergone processes of loss, suffering and death, including processes of anticipatory or disenfranchised grief, which can be particularly intense (Wallace et al., 2020, p. 75) but have been represented little or not at all in the media. The Covid-19 pandemic has sprung up precisely within the overexposure of the social ground in the media and on the internet at the same time that loss is still being experienced largely in private. Ethical debates on photojournalism in a time of pandemic In the field of photojournalism, the coverage of war, famine, illness and death has been a constant, contributing to the creation and circulation of images that, on one hand, provide a critical approach to reality and, on the other hand, afford a graphic document and historical memory as legacies for the future. The stark nature of some images may make us question the ethical limits of photojournalism and photographic representation (Tagg, 1988) as well as the need to show certain images in order to, for example, raise awareness of issues related to human rights (Linfield, 2010). The explicit photographic representation of violence, suffering and death has raised a host of ethical and strategic debates among media professionals and theorists alike (Butler, 2007; Grønstad & Gustafsson, 2012; Morse, 2014; Sontag, 2003/2007; Zelizer, 2010). Such debates revolve around fundamental issues: the limits of representation; the effects of overexposure to violence and suffering and the effect of repeated exposure or overexposure to certain stories in the media; and the political implications that are especially important in a period as visual as the present day. As a consequence, the professional seeks to strike a complex balance, using the camera to show what is fundamental in order to bear witness, generate critical opinion, and in some cases spur a change or reaction in the spectator, while trying not to contribute to compassion fatigue (Moeller, 1999). Accordingly, compassion fatigue controls and activates a mechanism by which media professionals very often choose subjects that not only are potentially more attractive for the reader, but also affect the type of visual narrative, which becomes increasingly more sensationalistic or extreme and thereby jeopardises the integrity of the profession – a danger raised by Pepe Baeza (2001) twenty years ago. According to Joan Fontcuberta, there are images that can transform life, change narratives and even create new currents of opinion (Fontcuberta, 2011, p. 4). Giving particular attention to images that have a dead body in the frame, Fontcuberta suggests that the image conveys an excess of truth and this excess sometimes 430 M. MORCATE AND R. PARDO becomes unbearable’ (Fontcuberta, 2011, p. 3). The ethical debate over which images are pertinent to publish is more complex, however, because it is necessary to take into account factors relating to the vulnerability of the individuals affected, the respect due to all people, the authorisations that are required to photograph and circulate images, the right to information versus the right to privacy, and so forth: in other words, the debate is about what constitutes the higher good. The present pandemic sheds light on a paradigm shift that was already present, a shift now gaining intensity, producing a watershed in the way that events of global reach like the pandemic are documented and perceived. Methodology The research methodologies used for visual analysis (Van Leeuwen & Jewitt, 2008), visual data (Banks, 2010) and content analysis (Neuendorf, 2002) in relation to visual discourse are not as well-implemented or systematised as they are in other areas. As a result, the present article makes use of mixed methods (Campos Arenas, 2009). A review of the literature and documentary sources that point to the importance of the media as an essential source during the first lockdown in Spain enabled us to limit the research design to 14 March (the day on which the prime minister declared a state of emergency) to 28 April (when the government approved the de-escalation plan). Three daily newspapers were selected for analysis. All three are ranked as among the most highly read newspapers, both online and offline, in Spain (Newman et al., 2019; Redacción Barcelona, 2019a, 2019b). In addition, this selection provides not only geographic diversity — El País and El Mundo are based in Madrid, and La Vanguardia in Barcelona – but also ideological diversity. According to one study El Mundo is ‘more to the right than average’, 1 while La Vanguardia is very close to the centre/average, and El País ‘tilting away from middle towards the centre left’ (SM Reputation Metrics, 2015). For each newspaper, we selected the PDF version of the national edition that coincides with the print version sold at newsstands and is accessible through online subscription platforms and dedicated mobile device applications. Over the 46 days in question, a total of 137 issues were published. All photos accompanying news items in those 137 issues were reviewed. With the study’s key words (illness, death and grief, abbreviated hereafter as IDG) as our key analytic reference points, we reached agreement on the adequate research categories to obtain an appropriate classification of the data and prepare the tables and graphs. The collected data show the representation of death, grief and illness in pandemic-related images in relation to the total number of images published in the newspapers over the period. Images were then sorted by those which related to news about Covid-19. Not included in the totals are any images from the weekly supplements, motoring pages or entertainment listings, as well as any pictures of columnists that accompany opinion articles. These images are excluded to avoid bias. The analysis in this article focuses on images representing Covid-19 illness, death and grief (IDG), where the term grief is extended to embrace images of mourning and the complementary category of other IDG images that include burials, cemeteries and morgues. MORTALITY 431 Lastly, a key element of the study has been to compare and contrast the collected data with the statements and experiences of photojournalists in order to gain a greater understanding of the findings and ascertain why there has been a lack of published images that represent dying, death and grief, among other issues. To achieve this, we conducted semi-structured interviews with six top-tier photojournalists who have had long international careers and worked on the pandemic in Spain during the period under analysis. The interviews were conducted until data saturation was reached. The six interviewed photojournalists are: Ana Jiménez (La Vanguardia); Alberto Di Lolli (El Mundo); Pedro Armestre (freelance photographer who collaborates with El País); Gervasio Sánchez (Spanish National Prize in Photography 2009); Ricardo García Vilanova (World Press Photo 2020); and Susan Vera (Pulitzer Prize 2020). They were chosen because they have taken some of the most iconic images of the pandemic or because they are among the photojournalists who have been most active in reporting critically on working conditions in the period. Precisely because of their public Graph 1. Percentages of photos by category: total for all the 3 newspapers (14/03/2020-28/04/2020). Table 1. Photos by Subject: Comparison of the three newspapers (14/03/2020 - 28/04/2020). Photos by subject (14/03/2020 - 28/04/2020) El País El Mundo La Vanguardia TOTAL Total IDG photos in Covid-19 news 149 303 134 586 Non-IDG photos in Covid-19 news 1884 1933 2811 6628 Photos in news not related to Covid-19 338 240 963 1541 TOTAL 2371 2476 3908 8755 432 M. MORCATE AND R. PARDO visibility and their own comments on the images, their names have not been anonymised. Results The total number of images is 8,755 (see Table 1), which breaks down as follows: El País (2,371), El Mundo (2,476) and La Vanguardia (3,908). Of these, 1,541 did not accompany news that bears any relation to Covid-19. The remaining images (7,214) were published with pandemic-related news, but only 586 belong to the IDG category. As Graph 1 shows, only 6.69% of the photos published by the three newspapers were IDG photos related to Covid-19, whereas more than three quarters of the photos illustrated news linked to Covid-19 but did not show ill people, death or grief (and 17.60% were images of subjects other than the pandemic). The total number of images that specifically represent the pandemic is even more limited. Of the images related to ill people, death and grief (see Table 2 and Graph 2), only 170 show patients. Of these, most are asymptomatic or recently discharged, while the majority of patients shown in the ICU are partially hidden and no image of the face of a dying person has been identified. Seventy-two images were designated as related to death and 38 to grief. Graph 2. IDG photos: comparison of the three newspapers (14/03/2020-28/04/2020). MORTALITY 433 Funding This research was supported by Project RTI2018-098181-A-I00, funded by: FEDER/Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación-Agencia Estatal de Investigación; and by the Fundació Grífols under funding provided through its 2020 research grants in bioethics for the project ‘Ethics of images of illness, death and grief in the time of Covid-19’. Notes on contributors Montse Morcate’s research focuses on the visual representation of death, illness and grief. She is coeditor of the book La imagen desvelada: representaciones fotográficas de la enfermedad, la muerte y el duelo [The image unveiled: Photographic representations of illness, death and grief] (2019). Morcate is a member of three research projects: ‘Making pain visible: Visual edia storytelling’ funded by FEDER/Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation; ‘Connected bodies: Art and cartographies of identity in a transmedia society’ funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness; and ‘Ethics of images of illness, death and grief in the time of Covid-19’ funded by Fundació Grífols. Morcate has completed post-doctoral research stays at Columbia University and the Morbid Anatomy Museum (New York), CSIC (Madrid) and MACBA (Barcelona). She has also been developing and exhibiting her own art works, pursuing projects in line with her field of research. Rebeca Pardo’s research focuses on visual narratives of illness, death and grief. She has led several research projects and is currently the principal investigator for ‘Making pain visible’ (RTI2018098181-A-I00) funded by FEDER/Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. Together with Morcate, Pardo obtained a 2020 grant in bioethics from the Fundació Grífols for the project ‘Ethics of images of illness, death and grief in the time of Covid-19’. Pardo has completed research stays at the University of Brighton, Harvard University, Spanish National Research Council and CEDMACBA. Her art works have been exhibited in Spain, UK and Italy. In 2012, she received the Ariel Prize for best young essay bloggers. Pardo has published various papers and book chapters and taken part in numerous conferences and lectures. She is co-editor of the book La imagen desvelada: representaciones fotográficas de la enfermedad, la muerte y el duelo (2019). ORCID Montse Morcate http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6594-2806 Rebeca Pardo http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4475-6411 References Aaron, M. (Ed.). (2014). Envisaging death: Visual culture and dying. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Baeza, P. (2001). Por una función crítica de la fotografía de prensa. Gustavo Gili. Banks, M. (2010). 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