Skip to main content

Site navigation

  • University of Technology Sydney home
  • Home

    Home
  • For students

  • For industry

  • Research

Explore

  • Courses
  • Events
  • News
  • Stories
  • People

For you

  • Libraryarrow_right_alt
  • Staffarrow_right_alt
  • Alumniarrow_right_alt
  • Current studentsarrow_right_alt
  • Study at UTS

    • arrow_right_alt Find a course
    • arrow_right_alt Course areas
    • arrow_right_alt Undergraduate students
    • arrow_right_alt Postgraduate students
    • arrow_right_alt Research Masters and PhD
    • arrow_right_alt Online study and short courses
  • Student information

    • arrow_right_alt Current students
    • arrow_right_alt New UTS students
    • arrow_right_alt Graduates (Alumni)
    • arrow_right_alt High school students
    • arrow_right_alt Indigenous students
    • arrow_right_alt International students
  • Admissions

    • arrow_right_alt How to apply
    • arrow_right_alt Entry pathways
    • arrow_right_alt Eligibility
arrow_right_altVisit our hub for students

For you

  • Libraryarrow_right_alt
  • Staffarrow_right_alt
  • Alumniarrow_right_alt
  • Current studentsarrow_right_alt

POPULAR LINKS

  • Apply for a coursearrow_right_alt
  • Current studentsarrow_right_alt
  • Scholarshipsarrow_right_alt
  • Featured industries

    • arrow_right_alt Agriculture and food
    • arrow_right_alt Defence and space
    • arrow_right_alt Energy and transport
    • arrow_right_alt Government and policy
    • arrow_right_alt Health and medical
    • arrow_right_alt Corporate training
  • Explore

    • arrow_right_alt Tech Central
    • arrow_right_alt Case studies
    • arrow_right_alt Research
arrow_right_altVisit our hub for industry

For you

  • Libraryarrow_right_alt
  • Staffarrow_right_alt
  • Alumniarrow_right_alt
  • Current studentsarrow_right_alt

POPULAR LINKS

  • Find a UTS expertarrow_right_alt
  • Partner with usarrow_right_alt
  • Explore

    • arrow_right_alt Explore our research
    • arrow_right_alt Research centres and institutes
    • arrow_right_alt Graduate research
    • arrow_right_alt Research partnerships
arrow_right_altVisit our hub for research

For you

  • Libraryarrow_right_alt
  • Staffarrow_right_alt
  • Alumniarrow_right_alt
  • Current studentsarrow_right_alt

POPULAR LINKS

  • Find a UTS expertarrow_right_alt
  • Research centres and institutesarrow_right_alt
  • University of Technology Sydney home
Explore the University of Technology Sydney
Category Filters:
University of Technology Sydney home University of Technology Sydney home
  1. home
  2. arrow_forward_ios ... Newsroom
  3. arrow_forward_ios ... 2020
  4. arrow_forward_ios 03
  5. arrow_forward_ios Empty photographs in the time of coronavirus

Empty photographs in the time of coronavirus

24 March 2020

Over the last few weeks, photographs in the news and on social media have documented our behaviour in response to COVID-19.

Dr Cherine Fahd, Director of Photography, and Dr Sara Oscar, Lecturer in Photography.

Empty supermarket aisle, no people, no produce

Photograph by Mick Haupt

Panic buying of pasta, rice and, surprisingly, toilet paper is represented in empty shelf after empty shelf.

That’s not all that is empty.

Images of empty public spaces – from the streets of Ginza, to soccer stadiums, to the Venice canals, to lone masked travellers on buses, trains and trams – evoke a sense of apocalyptic films and the end of days.

Photographs of empty public spaces are increasingly filling our news feeds, documenting our response to a worldwide pandemic.

While these pictures point to a frightening situation, we can’t help being drawn into the otherworldly and unfamiliar scenes. They make us stop, look and linger as we try to comprehend what these places without people are saying.

Our attraction to images of the world without us reveals a collective fascination for the apocalypse or, perhaps, extinction.

Empty shopping street in Italy

Photograph by Philipp Lublasser

Take the Instagram feed Beautiful Abandoned Places and its 1.2 million followers. These photographs show buildings in ruins or overgrown with weeds; old tourist sites now empty.

The images are “ruin porn”: when we take voyeuristic pleasure or delight in the sight of architectural decay or dilapidation.

The appeal comes from looking at a scene that could cause discomfort (or estrangement, or isolation) but doesn’t. The viewer is looking at a representation of the scene, not the scene itself, from a position of far-off comfort.

But another definition of ruin porn, a moral definition, is gaining pleasure from someone else’s failure, as seen through these architectural ruins.

Morally compromised as outsiders, we aestheticise a picture of another’s decline while looking away from factors that contribute to crisis.

The images in our current news feeds – despite what they say about coronavirus – offer similarly compelling visuals. We take delight in the formal composition of these images, which fall into tropes of the photographic picturesque.

Empty Manhattan avenue

Photograph by Julien Riedel

The absence of people provides us with the ability to see into the distance with endless visual perspective. We feel as though we are alone in the landscape, a heroic adventurer.

Why is our absence from the world so fascinating to view in photographs?

In the early era of photography, anything moving would be rendered invisible, while architecture (or a corpse) was the perfect still subject. Take for instance Daguerre’s 1839 photograph of the Boulevard du Temple, Paris, a bustling city street.

Grainy black-and-white photo of a Paris street with two figures visible

Photograph by Louis Daguerre

In this photograph, the street appears empty – with the exception of two figures who have stood still long enough to be captured by the exposure time required to portray the scene.

Photographs have always provided us with an alternative view of the world without us.

Contemporary fine art photographer Candida Höfer has made a successful career out of photographing large-scale empty spaces like public libraries, museums, theatres and cathedrals. Thomas Struth’s empty street photographs make German cities look like ghost towns.

These artists demonstrate a longstanding fascination with photographing architecture devoid of human subjects.

Outside of an orthodox church with no visitors

Photograph by Olia Nayda

This fascination may be due to what architectural historian Anthony Vidler described as “the architectural uncanny”. Abandoned and deserted spaces, he said, make our familiar spaces become unfamiliar.

For Vidler, this estrangement from space hinges on visual representation such as in photography.

These photographs of empty public spaces capture a departure from our everyday and instead visualise this uncanniness: an alternative reality emptied of our presence.

The uncanny, wrote Vidler:

Would be sinister, disturbing, suspect, strange; it would be characterised better as “dread” than terror, deriving its force from its very inexplicability, its sense of lurking unease, rather than from any clearly defined source of fear – an uncomfortable sense of haunting rather than a present apparition.

While we hide away and quarantine ourselves indoors, the world outside is captured in the collective imaginary as eerily without us. What we thought we knew of public spaces is instead evoking the sensation of being alone in a haunted house.

In images where we expect to see hundreds or thousands of people, we find instead a few lonely figures presented to us by a single observer: the camera.

Laneway with no shoppers

Photograph by Alex Kim

Pictorial urban life emptied of its citizens produces an assortment of emotional responses: estrangement, social alienation, melancholy.

The Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico captured this in his 1913 painting Melancholy of a Beautiful Day where an ominous figure stands alone in an empty town street accompanied only by his shadow and a Roman statue in the distance.

Made over a century ago, de Chirico’s painting surprisingly resonates with the photographs we are seeing in the news today. While it offers a historical example of the surrealist fascination with psychological dream states, it is also prescient of our current reality.

The images being captured by news photographers point to our fear of the pandemic and, fundamentally, of each other.

The photographs expose how swiftly we can become estranged from our everyday lives, how our surroundings can suddenly become something other – something fragile and tenuous.

The empty shelves, the empty restaurants, the grounded planes, the empty airports, the depopulated Mecca without worshippers, Trafalgar Square without tourists: these are all signals of the slowing of progress.

Hundreds of empty white seats in a sporting stadium

Photograph by Dylan Nolte

Photography is so good at capturing this because it is an unmediated mechanical eye that confronts our all-too-human eye. In these instances, the camera is able to be where we cannot be.

The mechanical eye is further exaggerated in the photographs which provide us with a distinctly nonhuman view of open, empty spaces.

Drone images give us an aerial perspective not readily available to the human eye. When viewed in the context of a global health crisis, there is no mistaking that we are – somewhat strangely – bearing witness to our own erasure.

We are accustomed to seeing images of crisis represented by fires, floods, bombs, warfare. The photographs we see as a result of COVID-19 are an emptying out and a slowing down.

This is a different sort of crisis, one that is mirrored in the uncertainty and slowing down of our financial markets and the need for government stimulus packages.

Underground carriage with no passengers

Photograph by Adam Chang

As cultural historian, Frederic Jameson said:

It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.

Perhaps this is precisely what these photographs are showing us: how the pandemic paradigm of “social distancing”, which isolates us physically from each other, disrupts and stops our lifestyles.

The pausing or end of our gathering in public, in airports and hotels, at tourist sites and sporting matches, in shopping malls, museums and bars, signals a rupture to the flow of everyday life.

Photographs of empty public spaces unmask the illusion that we are integral to existence. Even without a camera operator, optical technology will linger on and capture scenes of the world without presence.

Who can say whether that operator is human, or nonhuman, like a satellite from outer space that is still programmed to picture our buildings even if we aren’t in them?

Park benches in empty park

Photograph by Gautam Krishnan

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Conversation

Share
Share this on Facebook Share this on Twitter Share this on LinkedIn
Back to News in Design, Architecture and Building

Related News

  • Interior view of the Al Wakrah Qatar World Cup Stadium
    Designing the future of the built environment
  • A contemporary project (106 Lewes Road Brighton, UK) done with Waugh Thistleton Architects (2016)
    Paving the way for a sustainable revolution
  • Portrait of UTS Master of Planning graduate Claire Chaikin-Bryan
    Planning the smart cities of the future

Acknowledgement of Country

UTS acknowledges the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation and the Boorooberongal People of the Dharug Nation upon whose ancestral lands our campuses now stand. We would also like to pay respect to the Elders both past and present, acknowledging them as the traditional custodians of knowledge for these lands. 

University of Technology Sydney

City Campus

15 Broadway, Ultimo, NSW 2007

Get in touch with UTS

Follow us

  • Instagram
  • LinkedIn
  • YouTube
  • Facebook

A member of

  • Australian Technology Network
Use arrow keys to navigate within each column of links. Press Tab to move between columns.

Study

  • Find a course
  • Undergraduate
  • Postgraduate
  • How to apply
  • Scholarships and prizes
  • International students
  • Campus maps
  • Accommodation

Engage

  • Find an expert
  • Industry
  • News
  • Events
  • Experience UTS
  • Research
  • Stories
  • Alumni

About

  • Who we are
  • Faculties
  • Learning and teaching
  • Sustainability
  • Initiatives
  • Equity, diversity and inclusion
  • Campus and locations
  • Awards and rankings
  • UTS governance

Staff and students

  • Current students
  • Help and support
  • Library
  • Policies
  • StaffConnect
  • Working at UTS
  • UTS Handbook
  • Contact us
  • Copyright © 2025
  • ABN: 77 257 686 961
  • CRICOS provider number: 00099F
  • TEQSA provider number: PRV12060
  • TEQSA category: Australian University
  • Privacy
  • Copyright
  • Disclaimer
  • Accessibility