In February 2020, when some parts of the world were waking up to the increasingly rapid spread of a novel virus, 28-year-old Avishek Bhattacharjee set off on the streets of the capital city of Bangladesh, Dhaka, with a camera, a friend and a mask. “Look, coronavirus!” shouted the people who spotted him taking photographs of the woman wearing the gas mask with a hose. “I still can't figure out why they said it, and it happened everywhere we went,” the photographer, musician and marketing professional tells VICE. “They all thought the girl herself was a virus.” Dhaka was to go under a lockdown only on March 26, so when Bhattacharjee took these photos, the streets were still full of people who had no idea of the forthcoming social distancing protocols, though photos taken at some vacant spaces speak more to the mood today.
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Bhattacharjee’s photo series, unfussily titled ‘The Epidemic’, actually started off as an idea way before the first coronavirus patient in the world was even detected. “This idea came to me around eight months back before the COVID-19 situation actually came into being. Dhaka became extremely polluted due to the sudden start of the metro rail construction all over the city and it became extremely unhealthy,” he says of the city consistently ranked among the most polluted in the world. “But I couldn’t start the work at that time due to some professional commitment. So finally, I took the initiative at the end of February to do the photoshoot. At that point, I remember thinking: ‘Dhaka is already so polluted and overpopulated; what will happen when COVID-19 hits it? That will be just catastrophic.’ So I crafted the story anticipating the situation.”
The photographs strike hard today, especially because even as the world celebrates blue skies as a result of people staying indoors, some developing countries are in greater danger because of the murky correlation between air pollution and the virus. “The evidence we have is pretty clear. that people who have been living in places that are more polluted over time, that they are more likely to die from coronavirus,” said Aaron Bernstein, the director of the Center for Climate, Health, and Global Environment at Harvard University, to the BBC.
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This is especially scary in Dhaka, where people continue to defy the lockdown. “The authorities are taking action but people do get out as a lot of them belong to middle or lower income groups, so it has been very difficult for them to survive in this situation,” says Bhattacharjee.
When he shot the series, Bhattacharjee and his friend encountered people curiously checking out the online-bought mask, mostly in amusement and without a tinge of fear. “With this photo series, my aim is to show people how things might be for all of us if we do not take action on our current situation,” says Bhattacharjee. “People are getting out during the lockdown and the situation is getting worse everyday, with the number of patients rapidly increasing too. We do not have proper infrastructure to deal with this yet. If we do not take the right action, we might end up in a grim situation like the one portrayed in my work, where there will be no social connection ever, people dying in the streets, and the city becoming a morbid place to live in. This is a story of the living being dead.”
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