Description
The city of Manaus, located at the heart of the Brazilian Amazon forest, was considered the national epicentre of the COVID-19 pandemic. Several epidemiological studies have shown that death and case rates alone do not account for the overall scale and dimension of the crisis. This can be attributed to the history of precarious health infrastructure and the prevalence of non-specialised personnel in the northern region of Brazil. It is also a consequence of the collapse of this healthcare system, facilitated by the actions of Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s former president, and his allies at the state and municipal levels. When statistics failed to convey the magnitude of the tragedy, the enduring markers of the Manaus crisis became photographs of the city’s most calamitous sites disseminated in journalistic publications worldwide. Among these, images of the public Nossa Senhora Aparecida Cemetery were among the most recurrent representations of the situation.
This article analyses photographs from a 317-item iconographic archive depicting the Nossa Senhora Aparecida Cemetery. These photographs were taken by four Manaus-based journalists between the first and second waves of the COVID-19 pandemic – broadly between March 2020 and January 2021. Due to restricted access imposed by quarantine measures, these images constituted the principal record of the event, illustrating the crisis for both national and international audiences. They also document the timeline of events that followed the collapse of the funeral system – from the alarming decision to adopt mass graves during the first wave to the revised plan for individual burials in the second. Most importantly, this article's goal is to understand them as they embody and territorialise the failure of the Brazilian state to guarantee the right to life – here interpreted also through the right to dignified burials and mourning practices – to COVID-19 victims and their families.
