Enlightened Librarian: In the eye of the news

In the eye of the news · Oct 5, 09:35 AM

And again today I am transfixed by the Mt. St. Helens VolcanoCam. I watched yesterday’s steam release in the slow time lapse of the camera’s five-minute updates. In 1980, I viewed the aftermath of the big eruption through the stunning black-and-white photographs in Life magazine. One photo of the blasted mountainside was a kind of negative corollary to the photographs of Ansel Adams—here was an American hell, although rendered in the same fine detail and balanced tones as Adams’ paradises.

With its large format and frequent use of black-and-white images, Life made a viewing experience that was at once distancing and imaginatively stimulating; one was caught in the glamour of the captured moment, peering through the inky window on the page. A web cam, however, presents an image almost without a surface; there is nothing in itself to hold one’s attention except that, just beyond it, is the real thing that happened five minutes ago. Instead of crisp focus and deliberate cropping is a grainy view of what is real—a jumpy, segmented sunrise and an epileptic eruption. I find a web cam image exerts an odd, almost magnetic pull, even though the web cam picture is entirely contingent—it will only exist for a few minutes before it is replaced by the next update—and so to me does little but call attention to the technology that got it to my screen.

The borders of a high-resolution static image on paper, on the other hand, tend to dissolve under one’s gaze, an experience one learns in childhood in becoming lost in a picture book. For me, in a sensation I can still recall if I’m feeling day-dreamy, it is as though the image itself takes on life, through the eyes’ rapid scanning and absorption of its details. Many times, and occasionally still, I have had dreams of reading a magazine in which the pictures come to life and pull me into their world.

It also occurs to me that one anecdote for information overload is to be present in the clear space of a news event as it happens, before the downpour of commentary and interpretation.

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