We live in difficult and special times. The coronavirus pandemic has triggered a series of measures around the world aimed at health prevention and hindering the transmission of the virus. The world economy has suffered a major halt, with the damages that this entails for many people and other problems derived from the more or less forced seclusion of millions of individuals, but collaterally the phenomenon of #lockdown is having other effects. The great decrease in air pollution, especially in the most populated urban and semi-urban areas of the planet.
The decrease in pollution is better health (4’2 milion people die every year in the world due to this factor) and at the same time .. The skies of many parts of the world, suddenly have begun to look cleaner. Visibility has been increasing regularly in its distance potential, highly diminished in recent decades, especially in South and East Asia, but also in regions of the USA and Europe. In some cases the new generations have realized for the first time in their life of mountains that they have always or almost always been hidden from their eyes. In turn, older people have rediscovered them, many with nostalgic feel, from the time when such episodes of good transparency often happened and the only limitations in visibility were given by meteorological aspects.
The global nature of the pandemic and the measures recommended by the WHO that are applied in many countries to varying degrees means that the increase in atmospheric transparency is taking place in many parts of the world, but above all we are going to focus on one country, India, in which the surprises of the people (and not only of the most systemic photographers or observers) have been such that they have spread in the media around the world. Two factors have contributed to this: The fact that the country had been one of the most affected by pollution of human origin and the existence of an immense mountain range, the Himalayas, the largest in the world, in front of their eyes, for all who live in the northern zone.
Our objective when wanting to make an article, was first to report the first case of the vision of these mountains from the Indian plain, but we intuit that more episodes of this type would occur within the period of confinement and as a result, we make a selection of the landscapes that the covid phenomenon has opened before the eyes of millions of people. In most cases, the authors of these photographs have not been professionals in landscape photography, but sensitive people whose admiration for what was discovered before their eyes has made them portray the horizon with cameras or smartphones.April 3rd
Beyond Horizons 