“Faith is an island in the setting sun,” Paul Simon sings, “But proof, yes, proof is the bottom line for everyone.”
Nikon Coolpix S3
Woke up early on Sunday morning, July 12, after a night of thunderstorm, to find a metal pole with three traffic speed signs attached lying in our (narrow) front yard, debris from a serious car crash all over the sidewalk, minor damage to our front fence. Whatever had happened, my wife Anna and I slept through it all in our rear bedroom that night.
The debris left behind included a front bumper with license plate attached (bearing a handicapped-parking permit). Using my little Nikon Coolpix digicam, we made a short video and some stills for documentation, figuring that since the driver could be traced we might get compensated for the damage. Then, having no idea what had transpired, we called the cops, who came in reasonably quick time for a non-emergency. They informed us that the car hadn’t been a stolen one (my first assumption), nor had the driver fled the scene; he’d been hospitalized, the car impounded, and an accident report filed.
Accudent scene, 465 Van Duzer, July 12, 2009
An hour after they left, taking the license plate with them, our neighbor Michelle stopped over. Her husband Rocky had come home early Sunday night, about 3 a.m., greeted by the accident scene shortly after it happened. No police showed up, but an ambulance had arrived for the clearly DWI driver, plus a tow truck for his vehicle. People from nearby homes and apartments were all over the street. Apparently we missed a neighborhood block party.
Rocky said the driver, who reeked of alcohol, looked seriously injured. Apparently, soused and alone in the car, he first hit a speed sign on the other side of the street, then swerved, lost control on rain-slick macadam, ran across the road and up onto our sidewalk and tried — unsuccessfully — to pass between a telephone pole and our front fence. The deployment of his airbag probably kept him from flying through the windshield.
Front yard, 465 Van Duzer St., July 12, 2009
The force with which he hit tore the speed sign planted a few feet in front of the phone pole out of the sidewalk and flung it like an arrow into our yard. As you can see, the sign advises driving at 15 mph on this stretch; he must have been going somewhere over 60 to uproot the speed sign and hurl it twenty feet through the air, then wedge himself in between the pole and the fence.
Michelle handed us an envelope. It contained five photos Rocky had made of the wreck. He’d grabbed his own digicam and documented the nighttime scene for us. He also got the card of the towing company whose truck hauled the wreck away. When he got up this morning he printed the images out on his digital printer, so we’d have the evidence. Yes, we have some good neighbors.
Car Crash, 465 Van Duzer St., July 12, 2009
Rocky’s pix aren’t very good, and the ones we made in the light of day won’t win any prizes. But they’ll do for proof, if there’s compensation to be had. And now I’m putting them online where anyone with internet access can find them. I could have done that within a few hours of the event had I any urgent reason to do so. All of this enabled by the digital evolution of what I dubbed “lens culture” in an essay from the ’80s.
We talk so much about what we’ve lost as a consequence of the shift from analog to digital in photography and the other lens-based media — almost exclusively it’s the down side that preoccupies us in that conversation. We need to balance that with thoughtful consideration of the benefits.
Car crash, 465 Van Duzer Street, July 12, 2009
This crash and its aftermath (including this post) represent the most trivial examples, of deep significance only to the injured driver and his family, not even of much importance to my wife and myself beyond some inconvenience, barely affecting our neighbors. Microcosmic at best, with zero news value. But our record of it, and this internationally available communication about it, exist due to exactly the same cluster of enabling technologies as the one now driving Iran toward reconfiguration as a more open society.
Accident scene, 465 Van Duzer, July 12, 2009
The electronic tools that gave us the Abu Ghraib photos and the images of the school collapses that killed so many children in China’s May 2008 earthquake, and that now threaten a theocratic dictatorship in the Middle East, prove themselves not just generative but transformative; they reconfigure the way individuals and entire societies function.
These technologies make “citizen journalism” into not just a catchphrase but a reality. The emergence of “citizen journalism” has its perils; see Fred Ritchin’s thoughtful commentary on the Henry Louis Gates arrest photo.
Be that as it may, there’s a direct line from our unimportant incident to the documentation of Oklahoma Highway Patrol Trooper Daniel Martin (white) throttling a paramedic ambulance driver (black) in May and the viral cellphone video of Neda Agha-Soltan dying on the streets of Tehran on June 20. This nexus of tools — the web, YouTube, blogware, cellphones and digicams, Twitter, Flickr. Facebook — has let so many cats out of so many bags that before you can get one back in it’s had a litter and they’re off and running.
Tehran’s fundamentalist despots now try desperately to spin all the upheaval resultant from citizen access to these technologies as engineered from the outside. Some in the regime have accused the British of sponsoring the resistance to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s coup d’etat. Iran’s ambassador to Mexico, Mohammad Hassan, has already pointed his finger at the CIA; won’t take long for them to blame it on the Jews.
That’ll be a hard sell, even among hardened anti-Semites. Too many of the Iranians themselves know too much from their own direct communication with each other during these past months, some of it from F2F encounters but much of it from phone calls, blog posts, Tweets, and digital lens imagery distributed via the web. Take a look at Guillaume Herbaut’s compilation, “Iran: The Twitter Revolution,” at Oeil Public for a sense of how people now get their news.
Any communication technology can be used to play fast and loose with the facts of any subject; the argument over the veracity of Robert Capa’s “The Falling Soldier” goes on. Digital imagery may be manipulable, and thus impeachable; but until you prove it’s faked, it functions as proof. And “proof is the bottom line for everyone.”
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SPJ Research Award 2014
Digital Lens Culture: Incident I
“Faith is an island in the setting sun,” Paul Simon sings, “But proof, yes, proof is the bottom line for everyone.”
Nikon Coolpix S3
Woke up early on Sunday morning, July 12, after a night of thunderstorm, to find a metal pole with three traffic speed signs attached lying in our (narrow) front yard, debris from a serious car crash all over the sidewalk, minor damage to our front fence. Whatever had happened, my wife Anna and I slept through it all in our rear bedroom that night.
The debris left behind included a front bumper with license plate attached (bearing a handicapped-parking permit). Using my little Nikon Coolpix digicam, we made a short video and some stills for documentation, figuring that since the driver could be traced we might get compensated for the damage. Then, having no idea what had transpired, we called the cops, who came in reasonably quick time for a non-emergency. They informed us that the car hadn’t been a stolen one (my first assumption), nor had the driver fled the scene; he’d been hospitalized, the car impounded, and an accident report filed.
Accudent scene, 465 Van Duzer, July 12, 2009
An hour after they left, taking the license plate with them, our neighbor Michelle stopped over. Her husband Rocky had come home early Sunday night, about 3 a.m., greeted by the accident scene shortly after it happened. No police showed up, but an ambulance had arrived for the clearly DWI driver, plus a tow truck for his vehicle. People from nearby homes and apartments were all over the street. Apparently we missed a neighborhood block party.
Rocky said the driver, who reeked of alcohol, looked seriously injured. Apparently, soused and alone in the car, he first hit a speed sign on the other side of the street, then swerved, lost control on rain-slick macadam, ran across the road and up onto our sidewalk and tried — unsuccessfully — to pass between a telephone pole and our front fence. The deployment of his airbag probably kept him from flying through the windshield.
Front yard, 465 Van Duzer St., July 12, 2009
The force with which he hit tore the speed sign planted a few feet in front of the phone pole out of the sidewalk and flung it like an arrow into our yard. As you can see, the sign advises driving at 15 mph on this stretch; he must have been going somewhere over 60 to uproot the speed sign and hurl it twenty feet through the air, then wedge himself in between the pole and the fence.
Michelle handed us an envelope. It contained five photos Rocky had made of the wreck. He’d grabbed his own digicam and documented the nighttime scene for us. He also got the card of the towing company whose truck hauled the wreck away. When he got up this morning he printed the images out on his digital printer, so we’d have the evidence. Yes, we have some good neighbors.
Car Crash, 465 Van Duzer St., July 12, 2009
Rocky’s pix aren’t very good, and the ones we made in the light of day won’t win any prizes. But they’ll do for proof, if there’s compensation to be had. And now I’m putting them online where anyone with internet access can find them. I could have done that within a few hours of the event had I any urgent reason to do so. All of this enabled by the digital evolution of what I dubbed “lens culture” in an essay from the ’80s.
We talk so much about what we’ve lost as a consequence of the shift from analog to digital in photography and the other lens-based media — almost exclusively it’s the down side that preoccupies us in that conversation. We need to balance that with thoughtful consideration of the benefits.
Car crash, 465 Van Duzer Street, July 12, 2009
This crash and its aftermath (including this post) represent the most trivial examples, of deep significance only to the injured driver and his family, not even of much importance to my wife and myself beyond some inconvenience, barely affecting our neighbors. Microcosmic at best, with zero news value. But our record of it, and this internationally available communication about it, exist due to exactly the same cluster of enabling technologies as the one now driving Iran toward reconfiguration as a more open society.
Accident scene, 465 Van Duzer, July 12, 2009
The electronic tools that gave us the Abu Ghraib photos and the images of the school collapses that killed so many children in China’s May 2008 earthquake, and that now threaten a theocratic dictatorship in the Middle East, prove themselves not just generative but transformative; they reconfigure the way individuals and entire societies function.
These technologies make “citizen journalism” into not just a catchphrase but a reality. The emergence of “citizen journalism” has its perils; see Fred Ritchin’s thoughtful commentary on the Henry Louis Gates arrest photo.
Be that as it may, there’s a direct line from our unimportant incident to the documentation of Oklahoma Highway Patrol Trooper Daniel Martin (white) throttling a paramedic ambulance driver (black) in May and the viral cellphone video of Neda Agha-Soltan dying on the streets of Tehran on June 20. This nexus of tools — the web, YouTube, blogware, cellphones and digicams, Twitter, Flickr. Facebook — has let so many cats out of so many bags that before you can get one back in it’s had a litter and they’re off and running.
Tehran’s fundamentalist despots now try desperately to spin all the upheaval resultant from citizen access to these technologies as engineered from the outside. Some in the regime have accused the British of sponsoring the resistance to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s coup d’etat. Iran’s ambassador to Mexico, Mohammad Hassan, has already pointed his finger at the CIA; won’t take long for them to blame it on the Jews.
That’ll be a hard sell, even among hardened anti-Semites. Too many of the Iranians themselves know too much from their own direct communication with each other during these past months, some of it from F2F encounters but much of it from phone calls, blog posts, Tweets, and digital lens imagery distributed via the web. Take a look at Guillaume Herbaut’s compilation, “Iran: The Twitter Revolution,” at Oeil Public for a sense of how people now get their news.
Any communication technology can be used to play fast and loose with the facts of any subject; the argument over the veracity of Robert Capa’s “The Falling Soldier” goes on. Digital imagery may be manipulable, and thus impeachable; but until you prove it’s faked, it functions as proof. And “proof is the bottom line for everyone.”
•