Introduction

In April of 2020, as New York City's COVID-19 death toll soared, a photographer used a drone to capture images of dozens of pine coffins being lowered into trenches. The picture underscored the grim reality of a virus which had started to kill hundreds per day. The pictures – soon followed by others of mass graves in Iran and Brazil – drove home the reality of accelerating fatalities. They also spoke to a deeper fear of the loss of individuality in death.

The images of mass graves were taken from a drone hovering over New York's Hart Island, a 40-hectare speck of land off the Bronx that has been used as a sanatorium and potter's field for over 150 years. It has been the final resting place for most of the city's unclaimed dead, including the very poor and the incarcerated. Hart Island is one of the oldest continually operated ‘potter's fields’ in the United States, yet it is completely unknown to most New Yorkers. It is not served by a ferry and its access is restricted. George Steinmetz, the photographer who took the photos of coffins being loaded into the trench on 15 April 2020, had his drone confiscated and was briefly detained by police for trespassing (Robbins, 2020). Before Steinmetz's drone photos were published, the island was non-existent for all but a handful of New Yorkers, those tasked with burying the bodies. Those people were, almost without exception, prisoners from nearby Riker's Island.1 Hart Island is not merely ‘abstracted from public view’ (Denyer Willis, 2018), it is secreted away as a matter of policy. While its outline appears on some city maps it is rarely labelled. In recent years, some openness has arrived in the form of compassionate visits for families of the dead interred there; although this required a significant amount of paperwork and visitors were made to surrender their mobile phones so very few photos of the site exist (Walshe, 2015). Trench burial on Hart Island is nothing new. At the height of the AIDS crisis, there were more than 1,200 annual interments there with only a number given to identify the individual dead in trenches holding 150 plain coffins.