The unstoppable rise of the citizen cameraman

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John Ashworth
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The unstoppable rise of the citizen cameraman

Post by John Ashworth »

Not directly rail-related, but maybe of interest to all those who walk around with camera in hand...

The unstoppable rise of the citizen cameraman

They are powerful, but one thing photographs and video can never do is give us the full picture

o Ian Jack
o The Guardian, Saturday 11 April 2009

The protests during the G20 summit were a carnival of photography. If they achieved nothing else - and that seems likely - they showed how the camera has become startlingly ubiquitous, as ordinary a recording instrument as the ballpoint pen but infinitely more believed than any words in a notebook.

Most people over 50 can remember a time when normal life stopped for a photograph. My father had an old box Brownie, the Model T Ford of photography, unchanged in its basics since the first one came out of the Kodak factory in 1901. When it appeared from the sideboard drawer, certain self-conscious postures were assumed; we were in the presence of a camera. Hold still! The shutter speed was one 25th of a second - more "swish" than "click" - and each roll of film held eight or 12 frames. Film was expensive. By a rough reckoning, I may have had my picture taken a couple of dozen times a year with the family camera. Add one or two for weddings, add another for the day when we were ranked by size on benches in the school playground. Perhaps, at a very generous estimate, a total of 40 images of myself set in chemicals every year.

Today, just by the act of leaving the house and travelling and shopping in London, I might be photographed 200 times in a few hours. Digitally, of course: darkrooms, fixing solutions, prints hung to dry - the old slow crafts of photography have largely vanished. This year, for the first time, a new American president had his official White House portrait taken by a digital camera.

The social impact of this revolution has still to be fully understood. Usually its consequences have been written about rather darkly, in terms of CCTV cameras and the surveillance state, but recent events in Britain offer a different verdict. The digital camera is an egalitarian piece of technology - cheap (most mobile phones have them), easy to use, convenient to carry and quick to produce images that can be spread throughout cyberspace in seconds. What we are witnessing, as any professional photojournalist will tell you, is the unstoppable rise of the citizen-photographer. Last Thursday, at the demonstration outside the G20 summit in east London, I saw them at work. A small war of cameras. Police were stopping, searching and photographing demonstrators at Canning Town tube station; the demonstrators photographed the police as they took their photographs; sometimes - a third viewpoint - a video maker turned up to get both sides in the same shot. It seemed to me then that the camera, so often accused of spreading violence by its fixation with physical aggression, could also be one of violent behaviour's great restraints.

There is nothing at all original about this thought. In 2007, New York mayor Michael Bloomberg declared that he wanted people to use their mobiles to record crimes in progress and to send the images directly to the police. And which of us hasn't speculated, however pointlessly, about the different course history might have taken if the first world war had been covered by live television broadcast from a Flanders trench? Or, better still, if every soldier advancing at the Somme had a mobile in his hand and sent home pictures of so many broken bodies in so many shell holes, until of course his phone went quiet and all his relatives could hear was the advice to leave a message. It would surely have been a shorter war.

In this way, it can be argued that the new cornucopia of visual information is a boon; to see more is to know more, and perhaps to understand, prevent and correct more. This week offered three outstanding instances of digital photography's effect on public knowledge, beginning with the video footage of a policeman knocking Ian Tomlinson to the ground and ending with Panorama's concealed-camera investigation into how visiting care workers look after the frail and old at home. The first was shot by an American fund manager, the second by a BBC team who went to the trouble and expense of actually training some carers (rather more than the care firms themselves managed to do) before equipping them with tiny cameras and sending them off to find jobs.

The first was accidental - the American just happened to be there - while the second involved complicated subterfuge. The result in each case was shocking. In this week's third example, however, the benefits of digital technology are not so clear-cut. Bob Quick, Scotland Yard's counterterrorism chief, enters Downing Street with a secret paper open to view. The information on it quickly finds a life in cyberspace, or that's the risk, and Quick resigns. In the old days all that would have happened was a D-Notice and the confiscation of several rolls of film.

One question arising from Quick's case is, do people have the right not to be photographed? Or do we demand the freedom to take and publish pictures of everything and anybody all the time? Japan and Korea have insisted that all mobiles give a warning bleep when their cameras go off, to alert possible subjects. French law prevents publication of portraits taken in a public space without their subjects' permission. As a consequence, the art of street photography - Brassaï and Cartier-Bresson among its famous former practitioners - has migrated to London and New York. And even New York has right-to-privacy laws that prohibit the "unauthorised use of a person's likeness for commercial purposes"; when Erno Nussenzweig, an orthodox Jew who didn't believe in graven images, discovered his picture in an exhibition and sued for $2m in 2006, it was the legal pleading that it was "art" that got the photographer off the hook.

These arguments are sure to grow because most of us in some incoherent but fundamental way believe we own the visual rights to ourselves. An even bigger argument, devolving from writers such as Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, concerns our predisposition to think of photography as the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. It isn't. In 1968 in Saigon, Eddie Adams took one of the most famous pictures from the Vietnam war, of a general with a pistol shooting an unarmed man in the head. It won a Pulitzer. It seems incomprehensibly barbaric. General Nguyen Ngoc Loan was reviled ever after, unsuccessfully sought anonymity as pizza restaurateur in Virginia and died in 1998. The identity of the man he shot is less certain, but he is widely believed to be Nguyen Van Lem, a Vietcong partisan who that morning had killed several policemen and their families.

Adams later befriended the general and apologised for the damage his picture had caused him. "People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation," Adams wrote in Time magazine. "They are only half-truths ... What the photograph didn't say was, 'What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American soldiers?'"

We've still to discover why a policeman knocked Tomlinson to the ground and why he died a few minutes later. If and when we do, it will be words and not pictures that tell us.
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Kevin Wilson-Smith

Re: The unstoppable rise of the citizen cameraman

Post by Kevin Wilson-Smith »

Interesting article - thanks John!
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