A customer at Parkgrounds said that there were signs going up in Cabbagetown. These signs read things like What’re You Looking At? and Thanks for Gawking. None of these signs appeared in any news reports I saw, despite all the coverage of the Cabbagetown damages.
Saturday morning, the Ides of March, the day after the tornado, the streets were dotted with people with cameras. Little amateur cameras, big digital SLRs, cameras with long lenses, cameras aimed out car windows, cameras in cell phones. Some folks drove around, popped open their car doors, snapped a shot, and moved on. Some walked from East Atlanta Village, where trees were laid across a handful of streets and an empty lot had become a graveyard for worn-out trunks, to Cabbagetown, where houses had become timbers and cars had been crumpled. They captured the honesty, the hurt, the shock, the confusion, the startling vulnerability of our homes and lives, the brutal unpredictability of the world’s impact on our illusory invulnerability.
It’s my feeling that un-doctored photography is, on some level, honest. It captures and reproduces; it doesn’t translate or imitate. It doesn’t render. It’s not a shameful thing to take a picture of someone else’s woe. It’s not crass to capture suffering on camera, because suffering is genuine and real and thus fair game for an honest medium. It happens, and so it can be recorded.
Saturday morning, I thought maybe I’ve been wrong. Maybe it’s more than awkward or un-neighborly to photographed a smashed home. Maybe it’s worse than rude. I’m still undecided.
What do you think?
(Photo by Elemess)