Articulating Visual Infrastructures of COVID-19 in the Global South through Pandemic Photography

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between photographic practice, visual epistemologies and iconographies of crisis, and the racialized and economically regulated infrastructures of COVID-19 in the Global South—including infrastructural transformations of built and non-human environments. Taking its cue from the conjunction of affect and image, planetary precarity and mediating apparatus, social activism, and archival framing within which photography as form and praxis, aesthetics and politics, is situated during the pandemic—this article will focus on a mix of journalistic/documentary, art, and amateur image making praxes by Samyukta Lakshmi, K. Venkatesh (India), and Muhammad Fadli (Indonesia). While considering the blurring of genres and styles that the specific spatio-temporal realities of isolation and distancing enforce, the analysis argues that the photography of the pandemic’s multiple registers and scales—from the microscopic dimensions of human and nonhuman bodies to the monumental scope of public places, environmental commons, and institutional architectures—does not just document an ongoing narrative of events. Rather, the photographic apparatus as a media ecology consisting of visual conventions, technological affordances and limitations, and the photographer’s own historically emplaced corporeality, actively intervenes into and modifies official infrastructural arrangements fostered by juridical, medico-legal, and social protocols.