It’s hard to remember, but when Covid first struck, many hoped the crisis would be short-lived. Officials at the Thomson Reuters Foundation and the Omidyar Network worried that poignant stories of essential workers braving the virus and everyday people struggling to survive economic dislocation could be lost over time.
That fear sparked Covid-19: the Bigger Picture, a competition the grant makers created that invited people across the globe to submit photographs that document the human impact of the pandemic.
“Words alone really cannot capture the anguish and the suffering people around the world have endured,” says Beth Kanter, chief advocacy and strategic communications officer at the Omidyar Network.
The competition attracted more than 500 entries from four continents and 91 countries.
Many of the photographs are sobering. In “Rest in Peace,” one of the three winners, shown here, health care workers in the Indian city of Thiruvananthapuram perform last rituals following Hindu tradition before cremating the remains of a man who died of Covid-19. Normally, family members perform the rituals, but that wasn’t possible because of the danger posed by the disease. The image was taken by Rakesh Nair, of the Times of India.
Winners received a series of photojournalism master classes and the opportunity to work with the Thomson Reuters Foundation’s news team on a story that will be shared through its global distribution network.
The Bigger Picture project also includes five photo essays that explore the pandemic’s disproportionate impact on people of color and low-wage workers in the United States. In one, photojournalists chronicled the lives of care workers in Florida fighting to protect elderly nursing-home residents and their own health.
Photographs have the power to move people to action, Kanter says. She points to haunting images from the Great Depression that galvanized public support for safety-net programs like Social Security as proof of their advocacy potential. “We want to use every single tool that we have to be able to tell a story about the kind of world that we want to build and rebuild.”
