Flash Mobs

As I was doing the research for a project, I ran across the photograph of the Hindenburg explosion. The photographer Sam Shere probably was the only one there with a camera ready, and consequently, it became an iconic photograph. If smartphones existed then, everyone in the area would have been taking the same photo or video, and singling out one shot would have been a difficult decision.

William Eggleston takes the best banal pictures of almost nothing. Some are as iconic as the Hindenburg photograph in some ways because they are the polar opposite. Any photographer can now take a picture of the side of an abandoned gas station, but not as good as Eggleston. It would be an interesting performance art project (if not already done) to organize "flash" mobs (pun) to take banal photos to make the point twice: 1) banal photos are ostensibly pictures of nothing, and 2) taking photos as a group makes anyone photo matter less. (However, a group of photos taken of one scene could be informative as a group if you examined each photo for unique aspects).

Yesterday 40 people were shot in an incident in Chicago and the Chicago Tribune didn't have any reporters available. Now everyone is a reporter/crime scene photographer at some level, even if it's just posting photographs taken from a smartphone and posting them on social media. There could perhaps be thousands of them, as opposed to the world pre-social media when there would have been one or two staff photographers in each of the newspapers sent to the scene to take photographs, as well as forensic photographers and amateur photographers with a film-loaded camera at the ready.

This reminds me of Weegee, or other crime-scene forensic photographers--or even Andy Warhol who amplified banality x100 with his silkscreens of grisly car crashes and electric chairs. Both took or used photographs with a sense of aesthetics.

Weegee: "When I watched the other photographers on stories, I saw they used the camera as a machine and that they thought like machines. My idea was to make the camera human. I was dealing with people at their most tragic moments."

The ironic thing about Warhol is that he made the silkscreens like a machine, and yet made them iconic (and very collectible). Making all the copies was a way to take all the meaning (and emotional pain) out of them. As he said, "When you see a gruesome picture over and over again, it doesn't really have any effect". When you see any picture over and over again, it doesn't really have any effect or loses emotional (or aesthetic) depth over time.