Pandemic Postcards – Nicola Bertasi

We have received mysterious postcards, addressed to the citizens of our virulent times. They are visual stories of epidemics that affect our present and recent past on this planet. 
A message? A suggestion? A warning or a joke of the space-time dimension?
Who cares. Here they are.
-Nicola Bertasi

Pandemic Postcards was born, like the best stories, out of a chance encounter. In the first period of confinement due to Covid-19, photographer Nicola Bertasi, during his research, came across an American public photo archive in which he found evidence of some significant moments of the 1918-19 Spanish flu in the United States.

As in a foggy and confused dream, those images of the beginning of the 20th century populated by figures with masks, signs with prohibitions and makeshift hospitals, have mixed and overlapped not only with the dramatic and daily images of the media, but also with the bombardment of commercial announcements and banners of new products that have suddenly become indispensable to face the emergency.

The Pandemic Postcards are based on a continuous parallelism of elements and events that, almost by an ironic game of fate, follow each other both visually and in fact, very similar between present and past. For this reason, their birth was a spontaneous act that Nicola Bertasi could not avoid: the aesthetic and substantial similarities between the two pandemics and their impact on society, even if a century apart, turned out to be too many.