Sandy over the Bahamas. Photo: NASA.
Boston.com's Big Picture has put up its Superstorm Sandy compilation, worth a look as always.
I have to admit to a bit of disappointment (from a purely photographic perspective). It's maybe not quite Big Picture's best work. After a strong opening photo, the general impression is of the more or less generic "look how bad it was" variety, a ticking-off of the standard list of "bad things storms do" without a lot of specificity toward what made this storm and the locale of its landfall unusual. There are exceptions of course, like the distant figures paying photo-homage to the crashing surf in #47.
The replica HMS Bounty, a 180-foot three-masted wooden tall ship, was lost with two of its crew of 16. U.S. Coast Guard photo.
Picture #19 (above) is a striking and distinctive picture from this tragedy, with the insignificance of the stricken Bounty tensioned against the vastness of the sea. That's a picture that will stick with me for a while. #31 actually conveyed real information I hadn't gotten elsewhere, by putting the conflagration on Breezy Point in perspective (other pictures I've seen, both moving and still, have been closeups that fill the frame from edge to edge with fires burning or fire damage, which emphasize drama but don't provide context). As a set of pictures I'm not sure the sum rises above the parts for me.
Mike
(Thanks to a number of tipsters including Ed Grossman)
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A book of interest today:
(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:
Tom Duffy: "Just got power back. Enjoyed catching up with the TOP posts. Please keep those without power in your thoughts and prayers. With the drop in temperature last night, it's really getting long-term miserable."
David Dyer-Bennet: "Yeah, I felt the same way about the collection. I was attributing it to the source material he selected from, but on absolutely no basis; it could just as easily be the better photos were there but didn't get selected. Still pretty good. I was following the Bounty sinking closely because a man I know through SF fandom was on it at the time. We got to watch him get off the rescue chopper on video. We've had a lot of flooding the past few years (coastal and otherwise), and there's a certain sameness to that."
Kevin Purcell: "One of the two people lost from the Bounty was Claudene Christian, the great-great-great-great-great granddaughter of Fletcher Christian."
Mike replies: That is positively eerie. To those who don't know the story, Nordhoff and Hall's famous and popular 1932–34 books comprising The Bounty Trilogy
Such tragedy. The second tragedy is the expectation of those effected that governments can make it all right in a New York minute.
Posted by: Eric Rose | Monday, 05 November 2012 at 04:38 PM
Thanks Mike for sharing your thoughts on this set. Yes, they are all very good photos, and I'd have been proud to have taken any one of them. But for most, the key feature is timing and access to the effect of the storm. Not that that's a bad thing, but that next level - documenting something poignantly and with fresh eyes - is much much harder.
I hope this post about photography gets more comments than the ones about cameras. Just another thing that I'm just saying.
Posted by: JohnMFlores | Monday, 05 November 2012 at 05:29 PM
Mike, I heartily endorse this for your viewing pleasure:
Natural disaster photo cliché bingo, courtesy of Making Light. Note that the primary authors of the blog, the Nielsen-Haydens are residents of NYC, as are many of the regulars, and that this was not intended as detached morbid humor, but rather as a way to cope with the disaster as it unfurled.
Making Light is a comment moderated blog, and as usual, some of the best parts of the post are embedded in the comments.
Will
Posted by: Will Frostmill | Monday, 05 November 2012 at 06:18 PM
Picking up where John Flores left off...
Ultimately, a natural disaster is what it is because people are involved. If a tornado touches down in remote Siberia, do we care? Did we even notice?
In looking at the Big Picture Collection, it occurs to me that people were often diminished in the frame. We rarely see a person's eyes. Even in frames 3 and 56 the human interest angle gets lost in the context. Some of the shots could've been taken any place during any storm. Ultimately, the whole essay becomes a collage of dark stuff, broken stuff, misplaced stuff, sunken stuff. The emotional connection to stuff just isn't that strong.
Yet, when Mike announces that he's going to gently break in a D800E for me, it looks like ants at a picnic around here. We love talking about stuff. Even better if it's new, complex, expensive stuff like a D800E!
Which is it? Do we love stuff or are we indifferent to it? I'm at a loss here.
In contrast, human interest posts seem to attract far fewer comments. As demonstrated by this collection, we sure do want that strong human angle in our photos. Could it be that we're looking for a connection in photos that we're hesitant to make ourselves? To paraphrase John, someday I hope a post about people draws as much interest as one about stuff.
Posted by: Ed Grossman | Monday, 05 November 2012 at 09:56 PM
As I drove under that big cloud disc, in my tiny little Lotus car on those big bad Interstate highways.... It was a very spooky sight. Ominous if you knew what you were looking at.
I was lucky to be only going to the snow country of West Virginia.
Bad enough, but I got off easy. At least with the weather.
Posted by: Doug C | Monday, 05 November 2012 at 11:01 PM
You reminded me of how much I miss Rob Galbraith. He was my gateway to the Boston Globe and many other collections of outstanding photographs.
Posted by: Clay Olmstead | Monday, 05 November 2012 at 11:23 PM
I were confused quite a while as I did not knew that there were two replica of the old boat. The other one is anchored just around the corner my holiday home is.
Posted by: Dennis Ng | Monday, 05 November 2012 at 11:56 PM
A couple of thoughts. Lets hear it for those people who are acting as picture editors. We can hardly pay photojournalists a decent wage but picture editors are suddenly as scarce as hens teeth, as my grandmother used to say. And those that do exist have to know more about Photoshop and HTML than they do about photojournalism. But there are a lot of hard-working people out there making sure we see the best images. Thanks to them.
The other, related to Mike's search for a perfect camera, is inasmuch as our digital behemoths with their f/2.8 lenses weigh as much as Mathew Brady's gear, would someone please give us something to the M2 and OM-1 for digital work? it's bad enough my back hurts and Ibruprofen stock is going up daily, it's hard to work with these monsters. We stick out like sore thumbs.
Then again, at my age maybe it's best to sit on the front porch and sip iced tea.
Posted by: Gary Miller | Tuesday, 06 November 2012 at 07:57 AM