A plague doctor dances with a rat at a Covid ball: Lisl Ponger’s best photograph
‘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.
Different countries measured social distancing in different terms. In Austria, for some unknown reason, we were told to stay the length of a baby elephant apart. I found a list of measurements suggested by different countries and discovered that in Florida, people were told to visualise a baby alligator. By including a character in an alligator mask, the social distancing gesture became a dance gesture. One of the dancers has a face mask with the virus on it. I designed it myself using an online platform that would print you your own mask – they really liked it and asked: “Can we use your design?”
I got into this type of staged photography by looking at paintings, and am very interested in colonialism and postcolonialism, a field that informs much of my work. Danse Macabre is half of my Masquerade diptych. The other half is called Hidden Transcript and includes characters from carnivals in different countries – there’s a lady with a rattle from a Peruvian carnival, a man in a New Orleans Mardi Gras headdress, a red mask from Andalusia and a Trinidadian devil mas character, like a blue dragon. They’re dancing behind a seated woman in a dress made of green curtain material, recalling the one worn by Scarlett O’Hara in the ball scene in Gone with the Wind. I took the two photographs on consecutive days, using the same models, in the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. Since it was about masked balls, I needed a nice floor.
I used to use friends in my photographs, but found it is much better to use actors or dancers because they have a different feeling for their bodies. They’re better at moving, but also better at holding a position when I need them to. The summer of 2021, when this was taken, was one of the hottest on record in Europe and I was using lights which made it even hotter indoors. It was quite exhausting, especially for the woman playing the rat.
We had a truck parked outside with a generator to power the lights. It made a slight noise, and someone living nearby called the police to complain he was being disturbed. They came, took one look and said: “Yeah, just park around the corner and forget about that guy.” I invited the guy in and asked if he wanted to look at what we were doing, but he refused. I think he just wanted to be angry.
It’s not possible to immediately decipher all the meaning and research that goes into my photographs. What I provide is a surface that looks interesting and a title that might open some doors and make the viewer want to find out more. To catch people, the work can’t just be clever – the trick is to make the pictures beautiful and clever.
Lisl Ponger’s CV
Born: 1947, Nuremberg
High point: A monograph published for a show in the Museum of Modern Art in Vienna, another with Charim Galerie Wien, and all of it right now is a high point.
Top tip: Be inquisitive, read, and never give up.
• Lisl Ponger is part of Hundred Heroines, the UK’s only charity dedicated to women in photography. Semiotic Ghosts, a collection of illustrated essays on her work, is published by Edition Zyphius.