Viral Images

The role of photography in documenting India’s COVID-19 disaster

- TANVI MISHRA

A distant, top-angle view shows a tightly packed housing tenement and an empty plot adjacent to it. The plot is scattered with incandescent spots—the brightest of these resembles a bonfire. If you look long enough, in the darker areas you can see fires that are dying out, with the last embers glowing next to blocks of wood and circles of ash. This is a drone photograph of the cremations of COVID-19 victims at Delhi’s Old Seemapuri ground by the Reuters photographer Danish Siddiqui.

As a brutal second wave of COVID-19 swept through the capital in April, this image was one of the first to visualise the massive scale of the crisis. While a still photograph typically displays a particular moment, this image evokes a period of time, a continuous cycle of burning funeral pyres. It had begun to circulate widely across social media on 22 April, amid desperate calls for oxygen, hospital beds and ventilators. It pointed at a reality that everyone had begun to fear: that graveyards and crematoria were overflowing. The composition also expands our view beyond the crematorium. These pyres were burning next to crammed colonies, whose residents had no choice but to breathe the rising smoke from the dead. While the living looked on in horror at the growing death count, what became increasingly clear was the absence of the state in managing the crisis.