Photography came to the fore of the coverage of the NYC subway pushing incident, after the New York Post ran a controversial front page image showing the victim’s last moments. The photograph has incurred the wrath of outraged internet commenters, who interpret its capture as a cynical act. This comment sums up the mood: “Heroes help, chumps take pictures.” ¹ The photographer, freelancer R. Umar Abbasi, has claimed that he was using his flash to warn the train conductor that a person had fallen onto the tracks.

While this is clearly not the place to judge the practical value of Abbasi’s actions, I’m interested in this event as it relates to photography. In an interview with Anderson Cooper ², Abbasi says that he was not looking at the viewfinder at all; the camera was extended from his body, so he was (in his own words) “shooting from the hip.” If we take this explanation at face value, he was operating the camera in the crudest manner possible, not even as a “dumb” button pusher but without any intent at all to produce images—these were just side effects of the flash. As he explains in the video, his camera was still on a daylight setting, from a previous shoot before he went underground.

The fact does remain that one of these underexposed, apparently unintended images still made the cover of a major metropolitan newspaper (I’m not sure how else to describe the Post in a way that makes it seem respectable). However, taken by itself, the quality of this image cannot cast any doubt upon the photographer’s claim. The reason for this should be obvious: it’s possible to produce a technically crisp image with literally no effort at all. Reading the coverage of this incident has reminded me of something Thomas Demand said when I interviewed him earlier this year: “Technically, photography is actually not that difficult. Now, it becomes clearer and clearer as everybody has a camera that it is pretty simple. A digital camera makes amazing photographs without you doing anything. The standard setting of a Canon Mark 3 just blows your mind, it’s fantastic.”

Whether you want to call it “technically crisp,” “amazing” or “beautiful,” it’s all the same thing: the aesthetic quality of images. We’re only a short jump away here from the old discussion (everyone’s favorite, I know!) of the “sea of images” ³ and why beauty is useless as a goal ⁴, and we can leave it aside for now. What jumps out from Demand’s quote is the idea that the relative technical ease of photography is not directly tied to the “rise” of digital photography. Digital, instead, is making it easier to perceive this state of affairs, though perhaps it’s taking longer to sink in than Abbasi might have liked.