In his 1947 novel, The Plague, Albert Camus writes of an epidemic, probably bubonic plague, that decimated the inhabitants of the French Algerian town, Oran. One of the curious observations he makes is that the “[p]lague had killed all colors”. Subject to a quarantine for nearly a year, the characters grow anxious and fearful. Inevitably, the suspension of life’s ordinary activities coupled with the relentless threat of death wears on them. It corrodes the affective dimension of their lives, making everything appear dull.
I know from personal experience that severe depression can change a person’s capacity to see colour. All the colours seem muted. Where, in ordinary times, bright colours spark feelings of joy, in times of extreme stress, those same colours can look as if they’ve been greywashed.
In the first months of the pandemic, when most people weren’t sure what was going on and stayed in lockdown, the pandemic threatened to produce a secondary health crisis by ratcheting up anxiety disorders, promoting feelings of depression, and encouraging people to cope through self-medication.
Recognizing my own tendency to view the world through Camus-coloured glasses (life is absurd and pointless so let’s lounge all day in the sun smoking cigarettes and drinking ourselves into a carefully modulated stupor), I chose instead to put the pandemic in a neatly wrapped package. I would manage the shit out of this thing. After all, what a shameful thing it would be to have an epitaph that reads: “Here lies someone who was such a loser he allowed a respiratory pathogen to destroy his liver.”
I did a lot of little things to promote a sense of mental well-being (e.g. making the bed each morning, dressing up even if I wasn’t going out). On the photographic front, I refused to desaturate my photographs. I ignored Camus’s observation and, even if it didn’t feel that way, I pretended the world was bright and shiny.
Only now am I allowing myself the luxury of black and white conversions. I’m far enough away from the early sense of uncertainty that I can now revisit my photographs from that time with a sense of detachment. Featured today is a photograph I made early in May, 2020 from the TD Tower overlooking Toronto’s Financial District. A solitary streetcar rumbles past. There are no pedestrians. No cars. The streets are pretty much empty. The scene really does deserve to have all its colours killed.
