A plague doctor dances with a rat at a Covid ball: Lisl Ponger’s best photograph

2026-02-11 - 15:15

‘In Florida, people were told to keep the length of a baby alligator apart. So I included a character wearing an alligator mask in my pandemic-themed masked ball’ When Covid started, everybody was talking about masks. I thought about the face coverings we all had to wear, and I thought about masks more widely. I researched masked balls and carnival masks and read a lot about the many outbreaks of plague in Venice starting in the 14th century, and about pandemics in general. This photograph, Danse Macabre, was inspired by Covid. If you take a close look at the paper lamps hanging from the ceiling, you’ll see some Covid-19 viruses smuggled in among them. In the middle of the scene, a doctor in a plague mask – the type still sold at carnival in Venice – is dancing with the rat that caused the plague. The couple on the left reference the fact that the Bolsonaro-led Brazilian government at the time of the pandemic was accused of allowing many Indigenous people to die unnecessarily [he denied any wrongdoing]. So those two deal with colonialism – the woman in the yellow hat represents an Indigenous person, the guy she’s dancing with is wearing a mask with the face of Pedro de Alvarado, a Spanish conquistador responsible for massacring Indigenous populations in Guatemala in the 16th century. Continue reading...