Walking down the street downtown yesterday, I watched a woman trying to take a picture with her iPhone. She was concentrating so hard she walked right into a light pole! Very entertaining.
I guess everything on earth has to be documented these days. This week’s Time Magazine has a cover story on the murder of an unarmed man by a police officer in North Charleston, SC. The officer would have gone on his merry way, nobody ever knowing what happened, except for the fact that someone was on the other side of the fence, shooting video of all of the event with his cell phone..
Commentary from Errol Morris, Academy Award documentarian and director of The Thin Blue Line:
“Photography doesn’t offer proof of anything. It merely supplies additional evidence, which otherwise might not be available. The evidence here is crucial, as it is in conflict with the officer’s own story. We wouldn’t know much without the video. And we wouldn’t have the video save for the courageous observers with a cell phone who possibly risked their lives in filming the incident.”
Late last night I was watching the local news about tornadoes that touched down and wiped out two towns in northwest Illinois. Most of the coverage was from cell phone video shot by people that stood in the path of the storms to capture images. One amazing piece of video was taken by a college student out the passenger side window of the car he was in after his father picked him up from school and was driving him home. As they traveled parallel to a category 4, half mile wide tornado, they reached a fork in the road. One route would have taken then away from the storm, the other route directly toward it. Guess which one they took!!!
A short time later, they thought better of it and turned onto a one way street (the wrong way) to escape. Pretty amazing that the father put his son in danger- just to get a video to give to a television station!