If you take a stroll down Farringdon Road, from Exmouth Market towards Clerkenwell Green, you will come upon a magnificent sight-line into the City of London. It is not until you reach the Betsey Trotwood and the Free Word Centre that St Paul’s Cathedral emerges on the skyline, but from further up the road, a new landmark is emerging – Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers’ Shard of Glass, currently under construction.
Since I work at the Free Word Centre, I regularly happen across this view. I often take a quick snap with the camera on my phone. Below is an example that has been filtered through Instagr.am.
A better attempt with an SLR and telephoto lense is on Flickr:
I have found that the damp and foggy days when the building emerges from midst are when the Shard looks most interesting. The giant looms on the horizon, and one’s sense of scale is confused and compressed, which reminds me of the famous photograph by the Liverpudlian photographer E. Chambré Hardman, ‘The Birth of the Ark Royal’, taken in 1950.
See also the weathered early photographs of Tower Bridge and the Eiffel Tower under construction. Watching The Shard rise, I have a strong sense of being embedded in history. I know that it will become a symbol of London, like Gherkin and Millenium Wheel, or the pointy Transamerica Pyramid in San Fransisco. Watching it grow makes me feel like I am sat inside an iconic, historical image.
Egypt Protests in Photos
There are some good images on Flickr. Andrew Sullivan points to some amusing anti-Mubarak signs, and a striking gallery of photographs. It is clear that the protestors have learnt the power of the image.
Heathcare Reform Photo
I just saw this photo on a BBC News report on healthcare reform.
It was pulled from the White House’s official Flickr stream, and I think it may soon become emblematic. It will be used to illustrate a huge victory, substantial but also symbolic, of the Obama Administration. The President looks chuffed but not ecstatic. A job well done, but you sense he will be turning to his staff to ask, “what’s next?”
Maybe that’s not what happened in reality. Maybe the President went mental and stood on a table with a knife, lording over his defeated enemies. But we don’t see that photo. Significantly, we only have this one image of the celebrations, so that is what will persist of that moment – its a clever bit of subtle PR. Politicians have been shaping the narrative with flattering images for centuries, of course. But its always interesting to watch it happen in real time.
Nowness
Here I am, writing on my blog at 2:45am.
I’ve just read an interesting short blog post by Nicholas Carr on ‘Nowness’:
The Net’s bias, Gelernter explains, is toward the fresh, the new, the now. Nothing is left to ripen. History gets lost in the chatter. But, he suggests, we can correct that bias. We can turn the realtime stream into a “lifestream,” tended by historians, along which the past will crystallize into rich, digital deposits of knowledge.
I think this is why James Bridle’s Tweetbook appeals to me. By pulling a large set of data into book form, James imposes a permanence on something that was previously transient. I plan to recreate the project for my own tweets one day soon – Not to publish to the world, but a single copy for myself. Twitter is a diary and it is upon diaries that some of the best history is derived.
I’ve found myself doing that with other creations too. I have hundreds of digital photos sitting on my hard-drive, but I busied myself last weekend by printing out about five of them as 8″x5″ and putting them in nice frames. I think that act of printing and fixing is an act of stepping out of the stream. An act of stopping. Only then can you look back, look forward, and perhaps, look properly inward, too.
Moving Photography?
Jason Kottke thinks that the stills video camera will become obsolete in a few years time:
As resolution rises & prices fall on video cameras and hard drive space, memory, and video editing capabilities increase on PCs, I suspect that in 5-10 years, photography will largely involve pointing video cameras at things and finding the best images in the editing phase. Professional photographers already take hundreds or thousands of shots during the course of a shoot like this, so it’s not such a huge shift for them.
I think he underestimates the convenience that the traditional method provides. Editing even a few moments of video is a lengthy process, and selecting a precise frame or three from a length of footage will be too time consuming for the average punter. Granted, professional photographers do fire off dozens of snaps in quick succession, to increase their chances of capturing ‘the moment’. But the ratio of wheat to chaf in this process must surely never approach that generated by 25 f.p.s. video (or film). I don’t doubt that at the very high-end, photographers will continue to use this technique, but the act of editing, of post-production, will keep the time premium high, and restrain its use to a limited number of professionals. Without devoting the time to inspect every single frame, how can you be sure the quality of the image would be any better than normal? It is certainly not an appropriate technique for photojournalists on a deadline, or the amateur snapper with other things to do.
