There’s a new entrant in the field of “photography where everyone is doing the same thing,” and this time, it’s got Boing Boing link juice behind it! When I wrote about this style a couple of weeks ago, I said that it “turns photography into hoop-jumping: ‘did you see how many fools I snapped doing this?’” I had assumed that the photos were documents of an instant that actually happened—if you look hard enough in a city, patterns emerge—but maybe that’s not the case. Have a look:
Kind of amazing how all those people are posing, no? Hey, where are any of the people with cameras? Oh maybe here:
What’s going on here is that Peter Funch has taken a whole bunch of pictures in Times Square (and other NYC locations), and stitched them together later so that it *looks like* everyone was actually there at the same time. Now that I think about it, Bahbak Hashemi-Nezhad probably uses this technique too. Color me… bored. As I said the first time, real work was put in to these images, but there’s nothing risked here at all, success was inevitable from the start. Basically this technique moves about as much as HDR flower photography.
I’m left wondering why still cameras were chosen to record these projects. If you’re going to stand in a spot for and wait until someone does [action X] or [is wearing all color Z], why not videotape it?? It would be a lot more interesting to see even a short clip of Times Square filled with people posing for photos, or of a Shinjuku station where people are only waving to each other.
Addendum: If I was a better 2point8 reader, I would have seen this three months ago…
Why so bitter? Also you picked the worst ones from the series.