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One Person City: Photographer Captures Shanghai During Coronavirus Outbreak And The 24M Metropolis Looks Unrecognizable (32 Pics)

The coronavirus has currently affected 28 territories around the world but is concentrated in mainland China. The country accounts for 42,638 confirmed cases out of the 43,104 global ones, and 1,016 deaths out of the total of 1,018.

However, numbers don’t necessarily paint a good picture of how the epidemic has changed the country. Photos do. And visual storyteller Nicoco shared a personal project that achieves just that.

One Person City is a photo series that documents Shanghai during the coronavirus outbreak. It does an excellent job of revealing the ghostly emptiness, isolation, and fear that the virus has inflicted on the 24-million-people metropolis, giving us a better understanding of what the locals are actually going through.

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7 hours ago

I get chill bumps looking at these empty photographs. I’d love to be there, under different circumstances, though which, I have no idea… It must have a dystopian feel about it….being all alone in a huge city! It’s quite exciting, actually, until you start to think about why no one is out and about…

All of this is really different from what Nicoco had experienced before. “I’ve been living in Shanghai for about six years. It is an amazing city where you see elders in tracksuits doing synchronized dancing, feel safe running late at night as a woman, and can access much of East Asia and Southeast Asia. It is a place of rich history where change happens instantaneously. In the time I have been privileged to live here, I’ve watched Shanghai transform from a cash-based society to completely mobile payments. Thousands of public bikes have seemingly materialized from air, and new metro stations open every year. In the ’90s, people saw Tokyo as the city of the future. Today, that city is Shanghai.”

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4 hours ago (edited)

Machines stop, pollution stops. Is this nature’s intervention?

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According to Nicoco, for the past two weeks, everything has stopped. “The government extended the national holiday, and only critical businesses are allowed to open (for example, grocery stores, sanitation and water facilities, etc.). Everything’s empty. Fresh products were completely bought out. As of Monday, February 10th, most businesses are allowed to reopen, but the city remains eerily empty as people stay self quarantined in their homes. There is a lot of anxiety in the air.”

Working on the series made Nicoco think about class privilege a lot. “As I traveled around the city and saw primarily low-wage workers such as sales clerks, janitors, and security guards, it was when I realized these people would be considered more fortunate than workers who are unpaid during this period or simply fired.”

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7 hours ago

Poor guy

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25 minutes ago

Why..What is there to clean?

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6 hours ago

wow

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2 hours ago

just to think that these places are normally packed….

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7 hours ago

That building on the right looks like it is leaning. An illusion??

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7 hours ago

What are those? For the subway?

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Read more: http://www.boredpanda.com/coronavirus-outbreak-empty-shanghai-streets-photos-nicole-chan/

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