The Accidental Journalist
Casually clicking around the news section of the BBC website I spotted this headline 'Fire under train in south London captured by commuters'. Apparently several commuters reaction to the events unfolding was not to vacate the area, attempt to help or acknowledge that may be looking on helplessly. Instead their reaction was to take out their mobile phones and begin filming. Recently a picture appeared on Facebook showing a sign allegedly displayed in a San Francisco office that stated 'In the event of fire please leave the building before tweeting about it'. A joke (hopefully) but an interesting illustration of our relationships with our mobile devices and their place within the context of the greater society.
There have been many incidents where the actions of bystanders in recording events on mobile phones have formed the bulk of our perception and memory of the event, often forming key or unique evidence of what took place. One particularly notable event was the police attack on Rodney King on March 1991 in Los Angeles. Local resident George Holliday videotaped the incident from his apartment and supplied the footage to a local TV news station. The result that was 4 police officers were charged with assault with a deadly weapon and use of excessive force, charges that all four were acquitted of, a result widely believed to have been one of the causes of the 1992 riots in the city. A second example is the use of camera phones underground in the aftermath of the bombings of London underground trains in July 2005. The Metropolitan police made appeals for anybody with footage to come forward with it as possible evidence. The irony of the situation being that such footage would technically be illegal as it is forbidden to photograph the underground without permission. The use of viewer generated content has now become an accepted and seamless part of news gathering and reportage that we scarcely regard with any surprise but this was not always the case and it is worth considering hoe certain key events in history could have had different outcomes had this immediacy and ubiquity of technology been the case at the time. It is interesting to speculate on what the effect of dozens, perhaps hundreds of different camera angles of the Kennedy assassination would have contributed to its aftermath for example. The Zapruder footage of the Kennedy assassination is possibly the best known, and most certainly widest known of the genre, though 9 years earlier amateur photographer Virginia Schau won the 1954 Pulitzer prize for her dramatic shot of the driver being rescued from the cab of his crashed lorry perched perilously overhanging the Pit River bridge in California (left). It was perhaps in the Iraq war that concept of the citizen photojournalist really came to be recognised as a 'legitimate' form of news gathering. Nightly, news images were displayed that had been collected by eyewitnesses in situ with mobile phones or still functioning internet connections, even the ultimate execution of Saddam Hussein himself was recorded on a mobile phone and uploaded to YouTube. If the contribution to 'straight' journalism was being acknowledged, there emerged from that conflict two entirely different strands of citizen photojournalism that need to noted. The first was the emergence in news bulletins of images of detainees in Abu Gharib prison being abused by their US captors. The images were shown worldwide and roundly condemned. Hideous as the images were they were never shot as news images, rather they were trophy images taken for private distribution that were leaked and metamorphosed into potent news images. The second contribution was the emergence of a new genre, the beheading video. To this day, certain radical groupings are creating news images and video themselves for distribution to news agencies and social media platforms. Increasingly sophisticated in both their technical qualities as well as their ability to distribute they are to this day a potent symbol of both the power of image and (ironically) the democratisation of news image gathering. the importance of this form of news gathering is further reinforced by the system of 'embedding' journalist within military units. Increasingly, access to unbiased information is being limited, though one benefit to journalists is they are accorded a degree of protection in conflicts were attacks on journalist are becoming more common. This theme was explored in the September 2004 edition of Foto8 magazine by Fred Ritchin and Pedro Mayer who reached an interesting conclusion that if the amateur photographers are the ones getting to the heart of the story, what future is there for the professionals. Ten years on I think we may still be asking the same question. |