In Photos: Low-Carbon Tbilisi amid Pandemic

On April 17, two days ahead of of Easter celebrations, the biggest religious event in the Orthodox Christian calendar, the Georgian Government announced nationwide ban on private vehicles in a bid to make it easier to aid social distancing and to dissuade Orthodox Georgians from attending the Easter Vigil en masse.

The unexpected 10-day long ban on driving offered many Tbilisians a glimpse of what low-carbon future of the city could look like.

On Friday and Saturday – April 17-18 – between 19:00 and 20:00, right before the dask-to-dawn curfew, Eléonore Garnier hit the streets to capture what would usually be traffic peak time in central Tbilisi.

In the words of Garnier, “the absence of cars in the foreground enabled the viewer to catch the whole city landscape in one quick glance. The pictures reproduce the feeling that many Tbilisians discovered during the holy week of 2020: without any moving distractions in front of them, they could finally look up.”