The Eerie Comfort of Liminal Spaces
Some of the most enduring images of the past two and a half years have been photos of freshly abandoned public spaces: an empty Times Square, utterly calm Venice canals, a seemingly deserted Shanghai. Their immediate power came from their uncanny postapocalyptic vision: This is what the world would look like without us. But years into a global pandemic, they now strike me as something else: artifacts of a world in transition.
Across the internet, another term for this genre of imagery predates the age of COVID-19. can be found has 1.2 million followers), Reddit ( has about 526,000 members), and TikTok (the hashtag #liminalspaces has more than 2 billion views), where users post contextless eerie pictures and videos that attempt to capture a state of being in-between. Liminal spaces are now an in online parlance, meaning where like-minded people see compelling images and post variations on them: Think of how , a trend centered on traditional values of nature and sustainability, became popular early in the pandemic.
