061: on expression (again)

to absent, to represent (revisited)

On Tuesday, I attended (over Zoom) RISD Photo’s TC Colley Lecture, a hybrid lecture-panel that included cultural theorist and professor, Fred Moten, critic and visual artist, Hannah Black, and conceptual artist, Cameron Rowland. The “lecture” was moderated by Zoé Samudzi, writer and assistant professor at RISD. There were a slate of reasons that I wanted to attend the event, most of all because I have been thinking about an essay Samudzi wrote in 2021 about the difficulty of visualizing the extent of the pandemic. “Did You Get the Shot?” challenges the notion that photographs of the pandemic can somehow capture the millions of deaths caused by the pandemic. I read the essay when it first came out, at the same time when I was taking a class where we were considering the visual culture of the pandemic. One of the things that my professor at the time was really interested in was the various infographics that were created to communicate the distribution of the virus across the world. Often we looked at the WHO (World Health Organization) Coronavirus dashboard and discussed the quickly changing nature of the infographic which, even in 2021 which didn’t always feel like the “peak” of the pandemic, changed almost minute-by-minute. The changing and evolving nature of this infographic potentially captures something that photographs, which freeze action into place, doesn’t. Still, the dashboard also points to this issue of visualizing and representing the pandemic in that it reduces human lives and human activity to colors and numbers on a map. So, while statistically accurate and thorough, there is a lot that the WHO dashboard cannot say even as it attempts to present a full scope view of the pandemic. Though we might assume the opposite, the same is true for photographs, Samudzi argues in her essay. While photographs may offer a more immediate, and therefore unmediated, image of the suffering and pain of the pandemic and COVID deaths in a way that an infographic cannot, there is a lot that a photograph doesn’t and cannot say.