Thursday, 4 March 2021

FLASHBACK - 20181020_153931.jpg

 Last night I looked through oldish photos that Google had saved without me noticing, and coming across this image taken or uploaded on the twentieth of the tenth Twenty-Eighteen, I felt like I'd found a photograph of Atlantis. Or of Lord Krishna revealing his true, planet-munching self to Prince Arjuna. How had I managed it? Photoshop? Or had I photocopied thousands of people, and then cut them out and stuck them on cardboard and pins, like the Cottingley Fairies? Was I even aware, in twenty eighteen, that I wasn't taking a photograph of a Trafalgar Square at all here, but of a crowd? 
 I couldn't have been. 
 Somehow this was normal.
 I've been a little worried recently about how many people I've seen out and about. I'm a less worried now. 
 Click to enlarge.

5 comments:

  1. Context is a curious thing. Random photo of London suddenly becomes a historical document* of the before times.

    *Yes it's a Galaxy Quest reference.

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  2. I would have missed it otherwise, so thank you!

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  3. Interesting times leave a mark on our language, so there must be some clever coinage that describes this gently disturbing phenomenon. Take a virtual trip through Chernobyl for the not-so-gentle version.

    Maybe the crab migration crew on Christmas Island have a term for it:
    crowds ON / crowds OFF.

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  4. That was a "Karate Kid" reference.

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  5. Ha! I will study these crab migration crews. I'm siure there's some VFX term for this. Oo, I'll add an SFX tag.

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