Japan Earthquake and Photography

Japan Earthquake and Photography

The devastation that has been wreaked by the 8.9 earthquake off the coast of Sendai, Japan is horrific. We’ve been watching video from various Internet feeds all day at the office, and the breadth of damage is almost unfathomable.

I came across two picture galleries of images. The first was the Boston Globe’s Big Picture, and the second was In Focus with Alan Taylor from The Atlantic (Taylor started the Big Picture which explains the similarities in layout — as an aside, I’ve always admired the fact that a news organization decided to prioritize visual story telling in large format over concerns of image theft).

bigpicture.jpg

As I was moving through the images, my first thought was “Who can look at these and say that photos don’t matter?” But it dawned on me that that is a silly argument that photographers probably came up with to make themselves feel better. Flat day rates and dropping usage prices doesn’t mean that photos don’t matter, it just means that there are market dynamics at play.

But I digress.

The more significant takeaways for me were:

1. Editing matters
There was a tremendous amount of overlap between the two sets of images. No doubt in part because as images come across the wire, there’s a limited number of photos for breaking news. But at the same time, someone is responsible for the selection of images. Even though the average person cannot tell the difference between a good and great photo, a good editor can, and the cream rises to the top.

2. Pictures tell stories differently than video
When it comes to something like the Top 10 Plays on ESPN, I often feel that video does a better job at storytelling than stills. A good alley-oop in basketball is hard to capture in a single still image. Yet, in looking at the images from the earthquake and tsunami, there is a enormous level of detail that you can get from that 1/250th of a second exposure that whizzes by too fast in video, or that video doesn’t have sufficient resolution to produce.

When I saw video of the tsunami, I said “Holy shit” to myself.

But when I saw photos of the tsunami, I got emotional. The large photos conveyed something ineffable that affected me.

Our hearts go out to all the people of Japan and the people affected by this devastating event.

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Allen Murabayashi is the co-founder of PhotoShelter.

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