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Covid-19 is the first pandemic to be broadcast and photographed as it happens worldwide. However, despite the plethora of images on countless aspects of the pandemic, few media images have covered its more sensitive issues, such as the collapse of the healthcare system, the process of dying alone, or the disruption to funeral rites and mourning. Consequently, the visual narratives of the pandemic are biased. They lack images that show its more dramatic aspects. This affects not only how the public perceives and reacts to Covid-19, but also the visual evidence that will remain for historical memory in the future. With one of the world's highest case rates and most stringent states of emergency, Spain offers an interesting case study to analyse the pandemic's photographic narratives and its missing images during lockdown. This paper focuses on the presence or absence of images dealing with illness, death, dying and grief, as well as their ways of representation. It delves into the framing of particular visual narratives through an analysis of the images that appeared in Spain's leading newspapers, together with semi-structured interviews conducted with renowned photojournalists who worked on the front line to document Covid-19 during lockdown. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The State of Alarm period declared by the Spanish Government due to the coronavirus crisis has had an exhaustive media coverage. However, it is observed how the visual story / narrative that has been published in the newspapers goes beyond the health field, focusing mainly on aspects of a social, political or economic nature. The types of images with the greatest presence in the representation of the harshest weeks of the pandemic determine the type of coverage, causing some relevant aspects to be minimized or invisibilized, and conditions the impact and the understanding of the severity of the disease in the society, in a particularly difficult and decisive moment such as the confinement of citizens. In the same way, the published images will have a later impact as a document by becoming part of the historical memory in the future. This article focuses on the analysis of the images published during the State of Alarm in three of the most relevant and broader scope national newspapers (El país, La vanguardia and El mundo), which is complemented by semi-directed interviews with several photojournalists who have covered Covid-19 during its first stage. The cataloging of the photographs in various categories is intended to observe the type of story that has been made visible of the Covid-19 (assessing the way in which this pandemic is being shown as an epidemic or syndemic), as well as to detect some of the most present and/or recurring visual representations and identify which are the most prominent absences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]