Elizabeth Rooklidge on Maya Gurantz
Unprecedented. For a while, we were all sick of the word. Beginning in March 2020, it was everywhere— the news, workplace emails, social media, announcements from political figures of all orientations, conversations among family members and friends. The COVID-19 pandemic was unprecedented, everyone seemed to agree, something we’d seen only in films and novels. Something we never thought would make its way into our reality. Unprecedented. But at the time of this writing, the word seems to have disappeared— not into thin air, but into air carrying the ever-new variants of the virus.
Artist Maya Gurantz knows that to describe this pandemic as unprecedented is entirely incorrect, and her project, The Plague Archives, documents how thoroughly pandemics have been intertwined with human history. How precedented this one really is. The project exists on Instagram, where Gurantz has collected and posted epidemic and pandemic-related material from throughout history and locations all over the world. The titular word “plague” technically refers to the bubonic plague, or the Black Death, of late Middle Ages’ Europe— an infectious disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, still around but now treatable with antibiotics. The word “plague” has, however, taken on a broader cultural meaning: that of a widespread affliction or calamity, carrying a latent biblical connotation of evil and punishment. While discussion of plagues had transmuted into metaphor or lore, COVID-19 brought their reality crashing into the present.
“The Plague Archives,” Gurantz told me, “was a sanity ritual that started in the first week of the first quarantine in March 2020.” Rereading a favorite book— Marina Warner’s From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairytales and Their Tellers— she came across an image of a plague doctor costume. Plague doctors, associated with the European bubonic plague, wore long black robes, gloves, wide-brimmed hats, and a distinctive mask with a large, bird-like beak, which was often filled with aromatics to dispel the bad-smelling air that was thought at the time to transmit the Black Death. Employed by cities, these doctors treated patients who could not otherwise afford medical care. But many were not exactly physicians, often having received little to no medical training, and served primarily to note deaths and infections for demographic records. [1] In what feels like a very 2020 twist, these figures were also known for their side hustle: demanding extra fees for snake oil cures. [2]
Struck by the illustration’s relevance, Gurantz took a photo of the plague doctor, which she posted to Instagram, tagging it #PlagueArchives. She began flipping through the books in her personal library, finding image after image that started to form a kind of constellation of contagious illness mapped across time. She decided to make a project of it. It became “a discipline for me,” she says, “in the middle of this madness. Once a day I find something from the vast human history of outbreaks and epidemics, and I just post it.” The Plague Archives presents a fascinating and terrifying trove of materials, culled from Gurantz’s own library and a wide array of online archives. And a vast history it is: from BCE to 2021; from China, to Ethiopia, to the United States; from leprosy, to cholera, to AIDS, to COVID-19. It gets personal, as well. A December 2021 selfie of Gurantz in a mask bears the caption, “Welp. #Omicron got me.” “So sorry it found you,” says a comment on the post. “May this plague pass lightly through your flesh and leave you no worse for it!”
It is of note that the project exists on Instagram, a platform that has proven central to the pandemic experience— serving as a vehicle for information and, more importantly, as a site where misinformation goes viral. Subcultures have proliferated there like an infection all their own, claiming that COVID-19 is a hoax and vaccines are harmful. As Gurantz points out, “Instagram provides a record of those subcultures in a way that we’ve never had before. The impact of that must be profound. People use social media to build their own realities.” While Instagram may be relatively new, The Plague Archives shows that the spread of misinformation regarding viruses and anti-vax conspiracies are not. An August 2021 post features a book by J.M. Peebles published in 1900. The American physician and spiritualist was moved to write Vaccination: A Curse and a Menace to Personal Liberty, with Statistics Showing Its Dangers and Criminality after a San Diego school system barred unvaccinated students from attending classes. Peebles: an anti-vax influencer of his day.
At this point in the pandemic, mask mandates have long been dropped, more than one million people in the United States have died of COVID-19, infection rates continue to fluctuate, and long-COVID presents a silent blight of its own. Right now, The Plague Archives reads to me as a lament. Spending time with the nearly four hundred posts, I feel a dark blossom of grief unfold in my chest, an articulated version of the sorrow that I, and many others, carry at this stage of the pandemic. Because there seems to be a willful mass-forgetting, an eagerness to “return to normal” no matter the continuing costs, abandoning precautions despite the reality that people are still getting sick, still dying, still becoming disabled with post-viral illness. Thinking about this desertion of community care leaves me feeling hollowed out inside, utterly bereft.
Yet there is something soothing, in a twisted way, about considering our current circumstance in the context of human history’s long arc. “History is very comforting to me,” Gurantz says, “even when— especially when— it’s about how fucked up humans are and how fucked up we always have been. It weirdly helps me through the grief.” I return to a January 2022 post from The Plague Archives. It’s a photograph of a pair of three thousand year-old skeletons curled up together in a grave. Uncovered in Russia in 2018, the skeletons’ teeth reveal Yersinia pestis, evidence that the bubonic plague existed for thousands of years before our records show. Is sorrow, I wonder, more bearable when it’s precedented?
Elizabeth Rooklidge is a curator, educator, and Editor of HereIn.
Notes
1. Joseph Patrick Byrne, Daily Life During the Black Death (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing 2006), 170.
2. Jackie Rosenhek, "Doctor of the Black Death," Doctor's Review, October 2011.