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May 12, 2007

THIS WEEK IN PHOTOGRAPHS

Originally, the working title of Watching the World Change was “A Week in the Life of the Photograph.” My intention was to use September 11, 2001, and the six days that followed, as a way of demonstrating the crucial role that imagery plays in our daily lives and in our understanding of the world at large. My overriding thesis, which I’d hatched in the early 1990s, was that you can take the D.N.A. of any slice of time – a week, a month, a year – and glean its essence through the photographs it generates.

This past week -- a rather random seven-day period, news-wise -- seemed particularly photo-sensitive. Since last Monday morning, I’ve been struck by the number of news stories that had photos at their fulcrum, whether in the form of still pictures, online videoclips, or film and television footage.

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On Arabic television this week, leaders of the hard-line Hamas party were chastised for their role in supporting and airing a children’s program that showcased a human-sized rodent named Farfur, a Palestinian Mickey Mouse, who lovingly urged school kids to rise up against Israelis and other Islamic oppressors. On Wednesday, the Associated Press reported that “the character squeaked on a recent episode, ‘You and I are laying the foundation for a world led by Islamists… We will return the Islamic community to its former greatness and liberate Jerusalem, God willing, and liberate all the countries of the Muslims invaded by the murderers.’” On Friday, according to The New York Times, “Farfur, a buffoonish figure, was seen cheating on exams. Asked why, he answered, ‘Because the Jews destroyed my home and I left my books and notes under the rubble.’ Another child told him this was no excuse for cheating, and after he failed the test, Farfur said, ‘I’m calling on all children to read more and more to prepare for exams because the Jews don’t want us to learn.’”

Across the Internet this week, viewers searched for clandestine shots, described in the British tabloid The News of the World, showing Lindsay Lohan and friends snorting cocaine in the bathroom of Teddy’s, an L.A. nightspot. Meanwhile, users continued to download a sequence showing actor David Hasselhoff in a prone-on-the-floor mini-stupor – on a tape actually shot by his 16-year-old daughter, who reportedly has been known to record her father during drunken binges as a form of home-movie therapy, in order to show him the morning-after error of his ways.

(The footage reminded me of comments last month by Allan Mayer, a expert in celebrity-crisis spin-meistering, who offered these pearls to Sharon Waxman of The New York Times after the Web site TMZ.com posted actor Alec Baldwin’s telephone tirade, left on the voicemail of his 11-year-old daughter. Quoth Mayer: “You’re seeing all these things ripped out of context…. There is no illusion when you’re watching a video that you’re seeing the whole truth. [But] as anyone who’s followed court cases, or been in the news business knows, looking at different outtakes you get different realities.”)

The documentary Looking For An Icon began its theatrical run this week. The film examined the long-term impact of four seminal images of photojournalism, including the haunting 1989 picture, taken by Newsweek’s Charlie Cole, of a lone protestor confronting a column of Chinese tanks in Tiananmen Square. (Magnum photographer Stuart Franklin and a videographer, whose name I don't know, also shot the same situtation.)

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On American TV screens this week PBS’s Frontline re-ran its riveting documentary The Tank Man, which concentrated on the video and still versions of that same moment in Tiananmen Square. Frontline reiterated the already well-known story of how the photograph has been obsessively censored on Web sites in China, as administrators for search-engine firms, such as Google, have kowtowed to Chinese authorities. Currently, according to the show’s writer-producer Anthony Thomas, “China already has 111 million Intenet users, monitored by at least 30,000 Internet police.”

What was most penetrating, however, was the episode’s reportage of how major companies like Cisco and Yahoo had supposedly offered China their search and surveillance technologies, quite possibly allowing the government to trace, detain, and imprison Web-browsing offenders. American law, Thomas contends, “forbids the sale of any crime control or detection instruments or equipment to China. But Cisco says this means ‘equipment such as shotguns, police helmets and handcuffs. Networking products are not covered by this legislation.’ But under pressure from [activists like] Harry Wu and Congress, the administration and the State Department are now reexamining the rules under which technology companies should operate in China.”

The photo-as-historic-document played its own role this week. On Tuesday, to illustrate the legacy of school desegregation in the South 50 years after the famous Arkansas high school showdown, The New York Times, on its front page, printed Will Counts’s famous 1957 image that had become the visual emblem of the divisive issue: black student Elizabeth Eckford, books in hand, being taunted by mobs as she walked toward Little Rock’s Central High School.

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In a similar light, the current issue of GEO magazine, out of Germany, republished little-known photographs from the Spanish Civil War bombing of Guernica, which occurred 70 years ago, on April 26, 1937. The pictures underscored what a friend had mentioned to me late last month, when I told him that I was about to give a talk at Amherst College that dealt, in part, with the use of photographs in memorials and museums to accurately convey historic events. “Perhaps Picasso’s Guernica,” he said, “is a more faithful representation of the horrors of that attack, and of war itself, than any collection of images by photojournalists who might have been shooting that event.”

In the business world this week, online photography continued to hold hidden treasures. News Corp., owner of the hugely popular community-portal MySpace, announced that it was considering spending as much as $300 million to acquire Photobucket, a picture-sharing Web site like Flickr, Fotolog, and Shutterfly, that lets participants file and display their personal snapshots and, if they like, upload them onto Web pages on sites like MySpace. The current issue of Photo District News, out this week, reported that the mega-photo-agency Getty Images had recently purchased Scoopt, a niche Scotland-based photo agency (created the week after the London transit bombings) that had made a name for itself by supplying traditional and online media outlets with pictures snapped by amateurs, whose work was often taken with picture phones or non-professional digital cameras. (See page 217 of Watching the World Change, which discusses the genesis of Scoopt in the context of citizen journalism.)

In astronomy circles, experts were buzzing about the discovery of a stellar eruption by a University of Texas researcher, Robert Quimby, who, in a paper about to be released by the Astrophysical Journal, reported using a robotic telescope at the McDonald Observatory to witness and record the explosion of SN 2006gy, the largest supernova burst ever documented – a star, some 240 million light-years from Earth, purported to be 150 times as massive as our own Sun.

Cinematic spheres experienced their own sort of explosion as the industry’s chief censoring-oversight body announced that henceforth any film featuring a sequence showing someone smoking a cigarette would risk receiving higher ratings. (The New York Post responded with the headline: “Butt Out!”)

During one 24 hour period this week, four events brought out hundreds of shutterbugs, professional and amateur alike: the public ceremony for Queen Elizabeth II on the White House lawn (during which scores of onlookers brandished digital cameras, and for which Her Majesty was caught on camera glaring at President Bush after a gaffe in which he implied she had attended America’s celebrations in 1776); the white-tie state dinner, later that night, in the queen’s honor; Time magazine’s annual “Time 100” fete, at Manhattan’s Jazz at Lincoln Center, celebrating the 100 Most Influential People in the World (Rosie O’Donnell? Colts coach Tony Dungy?? Yankee pitcher Chien-Ming Wang???!); and the annual Costume Institute Gala at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (at which stars, models, designers, fashion-industry insiders, and assorted glitterati, donned the crème de la crème of couture to attend what New Yorkers sometimes refer to as “The Party of the Year.”) Eric Wilson, in the Times, remarked on designer Donatella Versace, whom he said, “looked as if a disco ball had been assembled beneath her cleavage.”

Why, if this week is any measure, do pictures seem to be setting so much of the news agenda?

Pre-9/11, it seems to me, the primacy of the image was assured by two technologies that emerged in the 1990s: the advent of digital photography and the rise of digital newsgathering, which, over the course of the previous decade, had set the stage for the world’s transition to round-the-clock, perpetually updated TV news coverage. And yet since 9/11, two other technological advances have emerged that have further enhanced the power of the image.

First, there has been a proliferation of handheld devices that accommodate photos and videos. (On September 11, camera-equipped picture phones did not yet exist.) Second, new software tools have made it easier to post digital videoclips on the Internet, bringing about a glut of Websites like YouTube and TMZ, along with video-laden blogs, spawning, in turn, both a cultural addiction to news-and-scandal-as-entertainment (video-news voyeurism, you might call it) and an instantaneous public accountability for one’s every camera-snapped infraction or late-night indiscretion (with the Internet’s peepholes acting as a mass kangaroo court, justice meted out by the masses, video-vigilante-style.)

Welcome to the All-Seeing, All-Tattling, Net-niscient World.

[For a related discussion, read last month's post, "Mob Rule By Videoclip."]

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