December 30, 2008

Simple fact: urbanites carry cameras. Since the early part of the decade, when camera-equipped cell phones became the rage, more and more people have become, as one ad campaign put it, Pocket Paparazzi. So it was curious that amid the carnage in Mumbai last month, there weren't more photographs taken.

As this story in today's New York Times hints, the lack of photographs chronicling this attack (unlike, say, the 7/7 transit bombings in London or the Asia tsunami that claimed tens of thousands of lives four years ago this week) might have been due to the chaos of the situation--and the sheer terror. The act of raising a camera to one's eye literally put one in mortal danger in the sharpshooters' lines of sight.