Back in my school days, I remember studying history’s great disasters, the wars, the famines,
the epidemics of this or that and wondering what it must have been like to live through those momentous happenings. I had been photographing the Covid pandemic on and off for a couple of years, and as I look back on the things I saw and heard and experienced, I’m trying to grasp exactly what it was like living through this momentous time. It’s hard to know what to make of it all. The empty streets, the busy graveyards, the howling noise of ambulances and the blare of endless statistics. They all say something in their own tragic inflection about that time.
As someone who looks at these happenings mostly visually, I’ve tried to ask myself which of those aspects is most telling. Is it the novelty of seeing peoples eyes but not their mouths, or the shock of seeing a crew in their plague suits walking down my street, the throngs of sick people trying to get into an overcrowded hospital; or is it the deserted streets and shops which signify for so many economic catastrophe? It all definitely created a surreal landscape in which to photograph. I may change my mind with the passage of time about what stuck out the most, but for now, beyond all that we can see and hear and read, lies the simple truth of the devastating sadness of families who had to say goodbye too soon to someone they cherished.
I spent days observing those on the front line who were hands on with all that death and sadness – the diggers of graves, and the transporters of the dead. This is not to downplay those on the other side of the frontline performing the daily miracles great and small that keep people alive. it’s just that the other end of the line is what this enormous disaster is all about in the end. So what did I learn from my time spent watching the holes being dug, then being filled over and over again surrounded by the small groups of relatives on hand to mourn too quickly and say hasty prayers? That grief feels like a physical weight. That enormous respect is owed to all those who were witness day in and day out to someone’s worst moments. Those who continually and viscerally confronted the statistics. How could they not become exhausted – not just by the physical labor – but by the continual miasma of grief as they catch a quick rest, eat a quick lunch, as they lay down the shovel to print in marker, as best they, can the name and todays date on the grave marker of the next victim. It is a heavy weight. Speaking to some of the grave diggers, they told me that it is a difficult part of their job, seeing distraught mothers and daughters and husbands. But even more so they said is the heaviness of handling the burial of a casket that comes with no family at all. As I focused on all of this, watching and photographing, a voice in the back of my head continually reminded me, keep a bit of distance or you’ll collapse under the weight of those holes.
