Covid-19 and Spanish Flu: photographic parallels

Abstract

This work aims to search for photographic references to the Covid-19 pandemic in the
greatest pandemic of the 20th Century: The Spanish Flu. For this, we performed a qualitative
iconographic and iconological analysis (Kossoy, 2020) of five photographs or groups of photographs from the Spanish Flu period found in John Barry's book The Great Influenza (2020). Between the imagetic scope of Covid-19 pandemic, we also looked for contemporary photographs that portrayed the similar topics to the old ones in order to understand what is repeated and what changes in the photographic register of these two events that happened one hundred years apart in time. After the analysis, we identified evidences for a conceptualization of a pandemics and epidemics aesthetic, as pointed out by Lynteris (2016),
attached to the image production conditions of each time.