October 16, 2006

This month marks another watershed in the ubiquity of the camera in modern life.

First off, Google acquired YouTube (and its 100 million daily "video views") for a tidy $1.7 billion. Theirs was a marriage of the Internet Search gold standard with the new darling of visual dross, a juggernaut that has built its business model on swiping thousands upon thousands of videos from legitimate content providers and disseminating them for bupkes. YouTube's appealing twenty-something C.E.O.s, Chad Hurley and Steve Chin, promptly posted a meta-PR video on their site, both celebrating their windfall and mocking their impulse to hype it. (Astute as ever, cultural observer David Hajdu wrote about the acquisition in yesterday's Times, noting that the deal was consummated on the 50th anniversary of the advent of videotape, in 1956.)

So ever present are cameras in urban society that it was revealed this week that:

(1) a closed-circuit security camera, in the hours before the murder, may have actually taped the killer of the crusading Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, the 48-year-old critic of the Kremlin, who was shot in her Moscow apartment. (Politkovskaya had purportedly amassed videotapes showing evidence of torture and kidnappings in Chechnya.)

(2) a Coast Guard camera may have actually taped the moment of impact of last week's collision of a small plane with a residential Manhattan highrise, an accident in which Yankee pitcher Cory Lidle died. (Last Monday, over dinner at Elaine's, I made a bet with photographer Jonathan Becker that within the week a videotape of the actual crash would come to light due to the fact that so many cameras were always trained on the various stretches of the city.)

And this Friday, two important works will debut, each committed to the power of the still photograph. October 20 marks the opening of Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer's Life, 1990-2005. The show's companion book, from Random House, is a stunning achievement. (I have not seen the exhibition.) The book's juxtaposition of Public Image (celebrity iconography for magazines like Vanity Fair and Vogue) with pictures from the photographer's Private Life--showing illness, death, family gatherings, nudity, reflective moments, baby pictures--serves to capture the artist in the parallel processes of expressing (and perhaps even coming to terms with) the most intimate stages of her life while simultaneously crafting her own image (by choosing to make public certain private and unbearably painful moments). It is, simply, one of the most compelling photography books of this generation. [NOTE: I'm having a tough time linking to the Random House site. Sorry there's no link.]

Also on Friday, Clint Eastwood's film Flags of Our Fathers will premiere--an entire motion picture based on a single image snared during 1/400th of a second 61 years ago: Joe Rosenthal's iconic shot of six men raising the American flag on Iwo Jima during one of the final battles of World War II. (Watching the World Change discusses the many parallels between this image and its modern-day equivalent: the three firemen lofting the colors on September 11.)