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.
Context is a curious thing. Random photo of London suddenly becomes a historical document* of the before times.
ReplyDelete*Yes it's a Galaxy Quest reference.
I would have missed it otherwise, so thank you!
ReplyDeleteInteresting 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.
ReplyDeleteMaybe the crab migration crew on Christmas Island have a term for it:
crowds ON / crowds OFF.
That was a "Karate Kid" reference.
ReplyDeleteHa! I will study these crab migration crews. I'm siure there's some VFX term for this. Oo, I'll add an SFX tag.
ReplyDelete