Known and Strange Things - Teju Cole

The more photographs shock, the more difficult it is for them to be pinned to their local context, and the more easily they are indexed to our mental library of generic images. What, then, are we to do with a thrilling photograph that is at the same time an image of pain? 

There you are watching another death on video. In the course of ordinary life - at lunch or in bed, in a car or in the park - you are suddenly plunged into someone else’s crisis, someone else’s horror. It arrives absurdly, in the midst of banal things. 

A video introduces new elements into the event it records. It can turn a private grief into a public spectacle, and set popular opinion at odds with expert analysis. Within the space of a year, I saw too many such videos.

Object Lessons

This was not only the scene of a crime. It also made visible things that were not apparent in the video: the last view Scott saw, the exit from the lot, the unnerving quietness of the area, the banality of dying in a side lot off a side street in an unremarkable town. And being there also revealed, in the negative, the peculiarities of the video, peculiarities common to many videos of this kind: the combination of a passive affect and the subjective gaze, irregular lighting and poor sound, the amateur videographer’s unsteady grip and off-camera swearing. Taken by one person (or a single, fixed camera) from one point of view, these videos establish the parameters of any subsequent spectatorship of the event. The information they present is, even when shocking, necessarily incomplete. They mediate, and being on the lot helped me remove that filter of mediation somewhat.

[…] So epic and cinematic were the photographs from the Maidan that it took some effort to remember that they were first and foremost news images, unstaged depictions of real, ongoing human suffering.

Death in the Browsertab