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Why we can’t stop looking at pictures of empty cities –COVID-19?


 Psychology has a very funny way that it plays on the human mind and that is how it interacts with human emotions. Although we are hard wired for human interaction, it is those images of emptiness that appeal and satiate the human eye the most. 

Have you ever imagined or thought of the possibility of a human apocalypse or extinction? Its hard to imagine and we cant help but imagining what would this world be like without us?


There would be unfamiliar and unworldly scenes that would make us stop, look and linger – as if we are the alien peeping into this world from the outside.    



Perhaps, this is one of the main reasons why photographers across the world have been able to capture a dystopian glimpse of a world without people as people remain indoors and avoid all public places because of the Covid-19 pandemic.    

When there is a crisis we usually think of images such as fires, floods, bombs, warfare, etc. but we never ever think of emptiness or desolation of the entire world. This is exactly what is happening to each and every corner of the earth, as it has been swallowed up by the COVID-19.

Despite Corona Virus at this present moment, it is at this moment when we look at these pictures with the absence of people in them that we are able to visual an endless visual perspective and imagine ourselves like the heroic adventurer! 


Empty restaurants, airports, the depopulated Mecca without any worshippers, Trafalgar Square without any tourists, empty shopping malls; museums, bars and all public spaces signal a rupture to the routine life.     

Who would imagine a place as busy as Times Square in New York would suddenly turn into a ghost town as so the City of London and the Place de la Concorde in Paris?



   


Every disturbing picture that can be seen in today’s times whether it is a temple in Indonesia, an American diner in New Jersey or the Haneda Airport in Tokyo. The emptiness of every city proliferates just like the virus. 


























However this is just one side of the world, there is so much more that has not yet been spoken about! 

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