The Visual Culture of the Pandemic

Chapter 1 , “The Visual Culture of the Pandemic,” reconstructs the role of both photographs and Dashboard images by examining mainstream media reports on COVID-19 in the four countries that are the field studies of this book’s analysis: Italy, China, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The overarching argument in Chapter 1 is that, unlike previous pandemics, the COVID-19 pandemic was communicated by the global mainstream news media ecosystem through the images of numbers. This chapter examines the photographs of the Wuhan lockdown published by Xinhua News, the official state media outlet in China, which first staged numerical parameters of human presence and human absence in infrastructural spaces as the foremost signifiers of pandemic impact. While Western mainstream news absorbed this staging, the meaning assigned to these parameters was radically transformed by a dialectics between human desertification and over-crowdedness, which contributed to creating numerically formulated “landscapes of extinction.” This chapter claims that, despite the differences, both Chinese and Western photographs essentially (re)mediated the statistical logic of the Dashboard: the epidemiological maps continuously generated by the individual dashboards themselves. This chapter, thus, proposes that Dashboard images hold the highest degree of iconicity and greatest affective charge in the visual culture of the pandemic.