Camera phones and concert photography

           The widespread, amateur use of digital photography and mobile video has had a great impact on documentation of world events.  As discussed at length in the US news coverage of the Arab Spring, the omnipresence of cellphone cameras allows for a speedy, populist dissemination of photographic views of these events.  People take pictures or videos and post them to social networks and other media sharing platforms, creating a visual narrative both faster than traditional news coverage and perceived to be freer from overarching political influence.  The idea is that, when there is a flood of images of a single event, be it a protest or a massacre, there is a greater sense of truth than in viewing a single image or a small set of images, cropped and published by a news agency to go along with a story.  Use of amateur images on social media can also push an even into the public eye that might otherwise have been ignored, or keep avenues of broadcast open when governments or other forces try to stifle them.

            Less discussed is the impact of these devices on more trivial events.  The documentation of personal, family and social events have also been drastically altered by the use of smartphones and social media.  Sites like Twitter, Instagram, and Vine, all of which primarily utilize cell phone photography, are used worldwide to publish a record of everything from weddings to rock concerts, political rallies to baseball games, school dances to sports venues.  Of course, being digital and web-based, the durability of these images is in question, as is the viability of selecting and preserving “useful” images from the overwhelming amount of idiotic selfies.  Accuracy of digital photographs, especially those circulated on social networking sites, is also hard to assess.  All three of these issues, however, are nothing new, merely things that need to be reevaluated and reassessed with the introduction and popular use of new technologies.  In addition, there is value in studying the changing public and personal perceptions of what a photographic image means, what it is for, and when people choose to take them.  José van Dijck of the University of Amsterdam notes a shift in the use of photography from family and group documentation to personal expression and from photographs as memory aids to photographs as interpersonal interpretations of experiences (2008).

            I am personally interested in the documentation of popular culture and chose to look especially at how mobile technology is affecting the documentation of rock concerts.  Some of my favorite photos are from the early punk rock scene in London and New York in the 1970’s, a genre dominated by a few professional photographers.  Individual candid shots must exist, but have largely not survived or not been recognized as having a lasting historical value.  As such, the visual history of this movement is told from only a few specific viewpoints.  Motion picture footage is even harder to come by.  Many notable tours and concerts have no known video making it even harder to reconcile contradicting stories and vague accounts of events.  For example, the Sex Pistols’ Anarchy in the U.K. tour was a total failure.  One of the top acts, the Damned, were kicked off the tour after only one show.  What happened at that show to cause the split? The answer varies wildly depending on who you ask and there is no video footage or identified photographs to show what that infamous gig was actually like.  Until youtube, there was little to no publicly accessible footage of any of the punk pioneers beyond that which had been carefully edited, decontextualized, and used in documentaries.

Found at hardcoreshowflyers.com

An example of terrible, dubiously labelled (but publicly accessible and probably unaltered!) footage of the Damned at Mont de Marsan, 1977: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwN-XvVMbyA

            Today, every possible angle of pretty much every concert is documented and published to the web.  This tends to be illegal, as most venues prohibit video recording and some prohibit cameras.  In the age of the camera phone, most people carry a video-enabled camera with them at all times and videotaping of concerts has become ubiquitous and the rules are rarely enforced.  This has to do, in part, with why people make these recordings.  As Nokia mobile technology researchers Erika Reponen and Pertti Huuskonen note, people aren't recording a concert to profit from the recording.  Mobile videos’ primary use seems to be personal expression—a way of saying “I was here” (2006). 

            Professional photographers and videographers are often limited to portraying events and musicians as they wish to be shown.  Photographer Jason Wilder recalls that while shooting a Taylor Swift concert, professionals were only allowed to photograph Swift during certain songs.  Concert goes with cameras didn’t have any such restrictions.  Wilder commented that “the problem with this was that while pros were restricted to just one type of photo in one dress that every pro photographer got for the whole tour, this guy got photos of every costume change” (Munn, 2013).

            What does this mean for the Damned?  On their 35^th anniversary world tour, there were hundreds of personal videos and photographs taken and a youtube search for a single show (in this case October 20^th, 2011 at the Middle East Downstairs in Cambridge, MA) turns up videos by different concert goers in different parts of the crowd, recording pretty much every song from pretty much every angle.  There is little doubt or ambiguity as to the events at the Middle East that night—you can even tell in a few videos that I was there.

References

Batty, D. (2011). Arab spring leads surge in events captured on cameraphones. The Guardian. Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/dec/29/arab-spring-captured-on-cameraphones

Duffy, M. J. (2011). Smartphones in the Arab Spring. IPI Report. Retrieved from http://www.academia.edu/1911044/Smartphones_in_the_Arab_Spring

Munn, S. (2013). From Jagger To Bieber: The Evolution of Concert Photography. Aesthetic Magazine Toronto. Retrieved from http://aestheticmagazinetoronto.com/2013/02/28/from-jagger-to-bieber-the-evolution-of-concert-photography/

Reponen, E., Huuskonen, P., Mihalic, K. (2006). Mobile video recording in context. Interactions, Volume 13 ( Issue 4).  Retrieved from: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1142191

Van Dijck, J. (2008). Digital Photography: Communication, Identity, Memory. Visual Communication, Volume 7. Retrieved from: http://dare.uva.nl/document/138874