A supermarket with empty shelves located in Los Angeles, California, March 6, 2020. Images of these are also widely shared on social media feeds around the world. For most 21st-century first-world consumers, this shortage is a first. Etienne Laurent/EPA
It’s not the only thing that’s empty.
Images of public spaces that are empty, such as street corners of Ginza and soccer stadiums, Venice canals, and lonely passengers in masked masks riding on trains, buses, and trams, evoke the feeling of apocalyptic movies and the end of the world.
A bare Ein Bokek beach on the Dead Sea, Israel, March 15, 2020. A bird’s eye view that takes us to places most of us can’t travel. Abir Sultan/EPA
Images of empty public spaces are increasingly appearing in the newsfeeds of our social media and documenting our responses to a global pandemic.
Although these images point to the possibility of a terrifying scenario, we aren’t able to resist being drawn by the strange and eerie visions. They cause us to take a moment to look around, and then linger while trying to figure out what these scenes without being able to understand what people are saying.
Our fascination with photographs of the world outside of us is a sign of a shared attraction to the apocalypse, or perhaps the end of all things.
A priest on March 15, 2020, in Cologne Cathedral, Germany, in which the mass was canceled. The priest appears as the sole observer, resembling the visual image of a lone wanderer in the countryside. Marius Becker/DPA
You can check out your pick from the Instagram feed Beautiful Abandoned Spaces as well as Its 1.2 million users. These images show structures destroyed or covered in vegetation, former tourist destinations that are now abandoned.
The pictures depict ” ruin porn” that is, when we experience voyeuristic joy or delight in the view of decaying architecture or dilapidation.
The appeal is in the view of a scene that may create discomfort (or disorientation, or even isolation) however it doesn’t. The viewer is viewing the image that of the setting, and not actually the scene in itself, from a place in a position of a far-off, comfortable.
The London Underground, which was opened on March 16, 2020, appears to go on forever. Facundo Arrizabalaga/EPA
Another definition of the word “ruin porn,” as a moral concept is the pleasure that comes from the failure of someone else by looking through these ruinous buildings.
As outsiders who are morally compromised, we conceive of the decline of another while ignoring from the causes of the crisis.
The images we see in our news feeds, despite the fact that they are a bit skeptic about coronavirus, they offer captivating images. We love the formality of these pictures, which are a part of the tropes of the picturesque photographic.
It’s a deserted M7 motorway in Hungary on March 14, 2020. A posthuman, dystopian vision of the world as it is without us. Gyorgy Varga/Hungary Out/EPA
The absence of human beings provides us with the capacity to look out far into the distance and have an infinite perspectives. We feel like we are on our own in the vastness of nature as a hero adventurer.
What makes our absence in the whole world intriguing to see in photos?
In the early days of photography, everything moving was rendered invisibly and architecture (or an unidentified corpse) was a perfect still object. Consider Daguerre’s photograph from 1839 from the Boulevard du Temple, Paris, a bustling city street.
The work of Louis Daguerre, Boulevard du Temple Photographed by Louis Daguerre in 1839.
In this photo, the street appears to be empty, except for two people who are still long enough to capture by the amount of exposure required to capture the scene.
Photographs provide us with an another perspective of the world outside our reach.
