São Paulo’s Edificio Copan Illustrates NYTimes’ Front Page - 2020: A Year Like No Other

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – A year that will perhaps be remembered for centuries because of its uniqueness in interruption of the flow of human life on Earth was illustrated on the pages of this Sunday’s New York Times, and it chose a picture of São Paulo’s Edificio Copan taken by Brazilian photographer Victor Moriyama of São Paulo.

Page one of Sunday’s New York times shows an upclose frame of 24 apartment windows of one of Brazil’s most famous buildings, the Oscar Niemayer-designed S-shaped Copan building in the center of the Paulista capital city. It illustrates the city and the country’s double-barrelled trouble with COVID-19 and the policies of the country’s far-right president Jair Bolsonaro.

“São Paulo, Brazil, March 18 - Residents of the Copan building gathered at their windows to protest the pandemic response of President Jair Bolsonaro, who called the coronavirus a “fantasy” that was being blown out of proportion by political rivals and the press to weaken his government,” says the caption on the New York Times online edition, which was published ahead of the print Sunday edition, with a circulation of over 993,000.

For decades, the Times, an icon of global journalism, has retold the past in photographs through special editions named “The Year in Pictures,” and “The Decade in Pictures.” This year the high-definition pictures in large form illustrate the special they called “2020 in Pictures: A Year Like No Other.”

The graphic depictions of the year illustrate the wrenching, heartbreaking, sad, and iconic moments of the year, taking images from New York City and around the world scanning from Mumbai to Milan to Manaus, from Paris to the Bronx. But aside from New York-area images, the Times devotes more images to Brazil than anywhere else, two of them by Moriyama.

Explaining to its readers how the pictures came about, the Times says, “Victor Moriyama had been traveling for work in mid-March when he arrived back home in São Paulo to find the city was bracing for the virus.

” ‘President Jair Bolsonaro had been downplaying the threat of the illness, and citizens were worried and angry. They were protesting, but doing so safely from inside their homes. Mr. Moriyama wanted to capture the protest from outside one of the city’s most famous buildings, and took the photo as dozens of residents came to their windows to express their displeasure with their president.

” ‘It was fantastic,” he said. “The noise from the people was like a kind of orchestra’. ”
His second picture featured is sad and sobering. It shows some seven open graves, three workers in full PPE and seven members of a grieving family masked and huddled away from the men shoveling the area’s red dirt over coffins.

“Mourners said goodbye to Wilma Bassuti, a Covid-19 victim, at Vila Formosa cemetery, where workers in protective clothing were busy digging line upon line of open graves,” says the caption to the picture Moriyama took on April 7, in São Paulo.

A picture taken in Manaus on May 25 by photographer Tyler Hicks is the iconic image of the crisis in the state of Amazonas that has made the rounds in publications around the world, showing the blue-borders of 38 newly interred graves, and three coffins about to be covered in dirt.

“Rows of newly dug graves at a cemetery in Manaus, the Brazilian Amazon’s biggest city, where at one point every Covid-19 ward was full and 100 people a day were dying,” says the caption.

In the municipality of Manacapuru, also in Amazonas state, on June 1, Hicks took a picture of a glass-eyed man with no apparent life in him carried on a red hammock.

“Hammocks, like the one being used to lift this man, became stretchers to carry coronavirus patients to boat ambulances in the hard-hit Amazon region,” he describes it.

“They simply untied the hammock from both ends and carried this man in his own hammock out of his room down the hallway and outside to where the ambulance was waiting,” Hicks told the New York Times as they quote him in the description accompanying the striking photograph.

A picture by Ricardo Moraes of a prostate woman in Rio de Janeiro holding herself up by her arms atop concrete stairs surrounded by camouflaged armed forces shows despair in her face, the caption says she is “the widow of a man shot during a confrontation between the police and drug gangs. Police killings surged in Rio, with officers protected by their bosses and politicians.

Those were the pictures of Brazil the New York Times chose to illustrate our world in 2020. They were among pictures from hospital wards, parks, and homes in New York, of empty streets in London, shut-down subway stations and empty metro trains, of death, and dying, and people hugging each other through plastic barriers.