Since the beginning of the pandemic, I had the impression that photography would not be enough within the chronicle of what was going on. Don’t get
How does one forget the front page of The New York Times of May 24, 2020? No photographs at all. No articles present. Just a long list of people who died from coronavirus marking the tragic milestones of 100,000 deaths in the United States. And again, The New York Times: February 21, 2021, almost a year later. The first time I saw it from a distance, the block that occupied half of the front page resembled to me a grainy cloud, or the noise that appeared on cable TVs when the signal happened to go off. Looking more carefully, this gradient shade revealed to be a cluster of 500,000 dots, each representing a single life lost in the United States to the coronavirus. Another shocking milestone in the death toll of this global pandemic.
“The obituaries and photographs The New York Times has published over the course of the pandemic have helped honor thousands of individuals, but this graphic shows the massive, unthinkable scale of those individual losses,” wrote Lazaro Gamio, graphics editor at The Times, to me in an email. He continues, explaining his logic behind the The Times cover of February 21, 2021: “The nature of data visualization is that abstract symbols — lines, dots, bars — can represent 5 or 5,000 without changing their own physical form, a useful technique for many applications. But to mark an occasion as devastating as this one, our goal was to maintain a 1:1 ratio in the data to try to express the magnitude of this milestone. This way, the data would not conform to the visual, and instead, the visual would conform to the data.” In fact, the piling up of the dots corresponds to the increase in deaths spanning the period of one year. “I found it important to make a visual that is informative at a glance, but still rewards further study. At first, you can see the broad pattern of how the pandemic has progressed — and particularly how devastating the winter was — but then upon looking further you see that each mark is a death, and the full weight of the loss becomes overwhelming.”
When I asked Lazaro his opinion about the role that infographics had in the coverage of Covid-19, compared to photographs, his feedback was very sharp. “While photography can provide a window into one particular circumstance,” he wrote, “data visualization is ideally suited to show broad trends in how different areas are faring with the virus.”
Those words immediately reminded me of Fred Ritchin’s article that appeared in the Columbia Journal on March 20, 2020. In that piece, Ritchin wrote that “photography in the press tends to be reactive rather than proactive.” As a matter of fact, photojournalism, for its very nature, bears witness to factual events in their developments. Behind every picture, there are first-hand experiences that give birth to heartfelt visual narratives. Instead, it is a common belief that infographics can’t produce this kind of “warm” result; indeed, they yield a more detached and deadpan effect. But something prompts me to believe that when we look at an image depicting a person, an inner side of us tends to think “It’s not me.” While when we look at 500,000 dots, that same side of us thinks “I could be one of those.” Hence, I wonder if infographics could be that proactive tool Ritchin was speaking about. Maybe, as I recently read in the article showing the behind-the-scene of The Times cover of February 21, 2020, “graphics can introduce a whole new way of understanding what’s happening.”
Undoubtedly, these graphic front pages by The New York Times will go down in history for the ability they had to communicate the progress of Covid-19 in a precise, neutral and impactful way. But what if they were so clear in our minds also because they went exponentially viral on social media? We can’t deny their attractive quality – their “instagrammability” – and it is no secret that although fewer people read the newspapers, many succumb to the temptation to share snapshots of covers when a critical event happens. The front page of a newspaper is a tangible historical trace — one of the last in our ephemeral age. Thus, unconsciously, the act of taking a picture of the cover and then sharing it on social media somehow makes us feel like being part of history.
Speaking of the “instagrammability” quality of these graphic representations, I can’t help but mention the series Sunrises from a small windowby Sho Shibuya, a Japanese graphic designer based in New York. Hands up who recently didn’t see, scrolling the Instagram feed, at least one image with colourful shades covering The Times’s front pages as a dreamy stain. Shibuya’s compositions made a splash on social media and have been re-shared by millions of people since the beginning of the pandemic. Inspired by the sunrise he looked at every morning from his window during the lockdown in April 2020, he began to paint it using the front page of The New York Times as a canvas. “I was intrigued by the contrast between the chaos in the world with the stunning sunrises I saw everyday,” he tells me when describing how the project came about. “I started to capture the moments on newspapers, contrasting the anxiety of the news with the serenity of the sky, creating a record of my new normal.”
From the series Sunrises from a small window
© Sho Shibuya
The results of his pictorial gestus were extremely charming and emotional pictures, immediate and even a little hypnotic. Flawless in terms of level of shareability. “I believe everybody wants to capture and remember this significant moment in history,” he says talking about how his paintings became popular on social media. “The combination of politics, nature, and current events is probably striking a chord with people.” Indeed it does.
As we touch upon the theme of the powerful data visualizations created by The Times, Shibuya tells me how one of his latest paintings was inspired by the original A1 infographic of February 2021. “I created this painting to memorialize the day and to show how depressed I felt by the impact of the virus on our lives, all in less than a year” he explains. “The original graphic was an elegant way to share data. My painting is a more emotional interpretation of the news.”
Getting lost in my wonderings on visual representations of Covid-19, I came across Above The Fold, a research project by Brooklyn-based artist Lorie Novak, which helped me to better frame the phenomenon. Novak has been doing meticulous work of archiving and cataloging the covers of The New York Times since 1999. Currently in her studio she has collected over 8,000 front page sections of TheNew York Times and has divided them into categories suggested by the photographs that appear above the fold. Her visual analysis results in a sculptural installation comprised of 34 stacks of newspapers of varying heights, with each stack showcasing the frequency of the topics covered.
© Lorie Novak
“Over the years, Above The Fold became a concrete manifestation of contemporary trends and biases of U.S. media and culture of the early 21st century,” she tells me explaining the motivations behind her project. “In the constantly changing digital news cycle online, we are barraged with images. Daily picking up TheNew York Times each morning at my front door, I must contemplate just the one image that was chosen to convey the day’s news and wonder why this one.”
Regarding the coverage of Covid-19 and the type of images used to convey the pandemic, she says that “Covid-19 related images appeared above the fold on the front page of The Times 170 times in 2020. I had to rethink my categories. I looked at all the front pages in my Science & Health category and pulled out all the ones that dealt with Ebola, AIDS, and other infectious diseases, and my newest category emerged: Pandemics & Infectious Diseases. Of the 170 Covid-19 related images in 2020 on the front page, 23 were in hospitals, 5 were of testing, 5 were of dead bodies, 8 of memorials and grieving, 15 of empty city and transportation scenes, 12 about schools, and 32 were graphics.”
The subject matter of Novak’s research is mostly photography, but she couldn’t avoid also confronting herself with data visualisations this time. “Graphs have been very prevalent during the Covid-19 pandemic. And although all the graphics contained important information, most did not stay with me like an image can,” she says. “Anyway, seeing 1,000 names standing in for the 100,000 deaths covering the entire front page was very emotional. It is hard to imagine how a photo could have captured this.”
I swayed in front of this sentence. Novak took the words out of my mouth and hearing this from her, who has been studying the photographs that appeared on the covers of The New York Times for 21 years, floored me. I still don’t have a clear answer to my doubt whether photography has perhaps been overtaken by graphic in telling the evolution and the consequences of Covid-19. Actually, I don’t necessarily have to clarify my opinion about it – nor do you. But there’s one thing for sure: I am awaiting another graphic front page with a lot more curiosity and expectations; far more than awaiting a photographic one.
