Coverage of coverage

I missed my 15 minutes of flame yesterday.

A reporter from the LA Times left a message saying they were "working on an article about the documentation of the Hollywood fire and how people took photos and video of it." Unfortunately I was on a deadline mid-afternoon yesterday and wasn't able to answer questions until later (which was most likely after their deadline).

The article on the pro and am photographs of the brushfire that sent epic smoke sweeping from the Hollywood Hills toward Griffith Park before it detoured toward Downtown in the clear skies appears today in Blaze fans flames of Internet fame;

Part of the reason is the location: A large fire in the heart of the entertainment industry, where "everyone's a photographer and everyone's a filmmaker," said Jeremy Emerman, 19, who took shots of the fire from Mulholland Drive.

But the mass documentation of the fire also speaks to the way technology is changing the way we view events.

"Who knows what our obsession for documenting will accomplish," said Martin Kaplan, associate dean of the USC Annenberg School for Communication. "It may turn out to be raw historical material whose value doesn't become apparent until time passes."

The benchmark of last Friday wasn't how so many took a photo of smoke from a brushfire. It was how so many took pics with the intent to post them, instead of having photos stored in a shoebox as a personal record.

For the record here: I was at 8th and Hill and after taking pics of the smoke making an orange light against historical buildings, I went to the top of City Hall and took a few more. Yes, that's the LA Times at the bottom of the pic.

 

Comments

[eecue]

Don't feel bad, they interviewed me and then didn't use what I said or my photos. That's probably because I wanted money for them to run the pics though. Pretty funny that a newspaper would balk at paying for a photograph.