A Meditation on the Crowdsourcing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370
Given our awesome connectivity and the enhanced visibility of just about every square inch, the online public search effort is a visual and technological angel mission. And yet...
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The Photo that Sums up the Fukushima Anniversary
It's hard to tell what was most surreal as the Fukushima story surfaced for a day.
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Those Sensual Typhoon Pictures from the Philippines
I understand high contrast color is the new normal, but applied to disaster photography and extreme distress amidst exotic scenery, why does it feel like the stimulation is subsuming the information?
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Typhoon Haiyan: Early Pictures
Once again, it's not looting if people are starving and have no alternative.
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The Last Photograph
You would probably agree that the category this photo aligns with is "environment." That doesn't mean, however, that we can't start slipping around and go somewhere else with it.
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Things You Ordinarily Wouldn't Notice in the Daily Picture Flow: "First Responders"
Looking at a lot of news photos close together, you start to see patterns and connections you wouldn't ordinarily think about.
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Mineral, Vegetable and Animal: after the Quebec Tank Car Explosion, Robert Hariman’s Meditation on Oil
I know human beings were decimated without purpose. Nonetheless, I think this photograph captures something important about the larger economy of life and death in a machine age.
Continue ReadingAsiana Crash Photos: NTSB Scoops BuzzFeed
It's interesting and curious -- in this era of social networking, scoops, and competition for the money shot between new media, traditional media and citizen journalists -- to look at these photos of the Asiana Airlines crash site from the NTSB.
Continue ReadingSFO Asiana Accident: The Power of David Eun's "I Just Crashed" Tweet
There isn't a photo that comes close to the power of the one taken by passenger and Samsung exec, David Eun, from the brown grassy field just off the runway near the body of the plane. The question, though, is why?
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The Visual Power (and Inundation) of Tragedy: Oklahoma City and Newtown, Boston, Long Island, New Jersey, West, Bangladesh
Unless OKC was just strangely synchronistic with recent traumas, perhaps a concerning side-effect of this steady diet of disaster is that all the imagery starts to run together.
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OKC Tornado Photos: Iwo Jima
Most powerful images make it to the forefront by also tapping into our cultural and visual memory.
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Closing Act: The Bangladesh Miracle
Whereas we all want to believe that the images of the previous eighteen days really matter, I'm afraid that the American media consumer is so tied to the warp speed of the news cycle that those hopes might already be gone with the wind.
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Marathon Terror Memorials
With loss and memory becoming so formalized now, it seems like each catastrophe or attack necessarily becomes branded -- to cities, to specific locales, and also to symbols or events they most logically refer to.
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Boston and Lower West: How Two Disasters Stack Up in the Media Eye
Is it perverse to say West, worthy of our concern, care, questions and support, was the victim of unfortunate timing?
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Keystone Preview?: Crude Pictures from Mayflower
As the one photo of the rupture in the Wall Street Journal's parsimonious Photos of the Day gallery on Tuesday, I think this chessboard view is abstract enough to be pretty.
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Sandy Hook Ongoing: Kids in a Blanket
Why didn't I think of becoming the distributor for Colombian-made bullet proof blankets?
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The Japan Quake Anniversary and the "Ownership" of Commemoration
Looking at the photos from the second anniversary of the Japanese quake and tsunami yesterday, I couldn't help think about the visual politics of commemoration.
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