Cheap

[poliphilo]

The tsunami puts our man-made disasters (Iraq for instance) into perspective. Politicians disappear from the news broadcasts. Nothing they have done or could do is half as fearsome as this. We see the same footage over and over again: big frothing waves chase holiday-makers through hotel gardens, people huddle in the shelter of a wall until the water sweeps them away, a train that the sea caught broadside lies wrecked in the jungle while a voice-over tells us that some its carriages have still to be found.

I don't like to watch. It makes me feel cheap in every sense of the word. This isn't stuff one should be viewing from one's reclining armchair with a mince-pie in one's fist.

They interviewed a man who was in a fifth floor room when the sea hit his hotel. He said he didn't see how anyone on the beach could have survived. "Afterwards," he added, "we went downstairs and took pictures."

Would I have taken pictures? I hope not.

Comments

[morrison-maiden.livejournal.com]

I don't like to watch. It makes me feel cheap in every sense of the word. This isn't stuff one should be viewing from one's reclining armchair with a mince-pie in one's fist.

I feel the same way. I was watching it yesterday and the cameras panned by the covered corpses. I think that's horrible. To film the dead when they have no way of preventing it from being done. I'm pretty sure that most people would not want to be photographed when they have died...

I love photography as much as the next curious person, but had I been there (or in any similar natural catastrophe), I would not have pulled out a camera :\

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I think there are times when photographing the dead is appropriate. I think, for example, that Brady and co were entirely justified in photgraphing the civil war battlefields and bringing the horror back home. But natural disasters are a different matter. War photography can have a moral effect, but I don't see that there's any moral purpose behind photographing drowned corpses.

[morrison-maiden.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I see what you mean. War is definitely a situation where photos are important to understand what it's like. I mean, history books would probably not be as fascinating without the photos from then.