Photo of the Week!

F 5.6; 1/250; 117mm.

Shot on Plaza de las Cortes facing the Fuente de Neptuno, which is adjacent to the Prado Museum in Madrid, Spain.

About ten months ago, The Higher Flyer published an entry in to the “Photo of the Week!” series entitled “Soon, child, soon!” The picture depicts a little girl standing alone in a public square in central Madrid, and the accompanying blurb acknowledges that the times in that moment are “frightening, if not surreal.” There’s commentary on the various metaphors in the imagery and how they reflect that “throughout most of the world, things are looking up.”

Suffice to say, the optimistic tone of that post was both premature and unfounded; things got far worse most everywhere before COVID-19 was even remotely contained. A year has passed since the world shut down, and while tens of millions of people were infected by the coronavirus, we’re now in a better place than we were at the start of the pandemic. As reflected in the photo here, streets and other public spaces remain largely empty — many continue living under lockdowns and travel restrictions — but the mere development of and subsequent rollout of vaccines have been encouraging. There’s still work that needs to be done and we need to remain cautious and vigilant for a little while longer (my condolences to Parisians), but there’s reason to hope. It’s become cliché to write this, but the light at the end of the tunnel is bright and, in due time, scenes like this one in Madrid will be things of the past.

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