July 8, 2005
Phones Offer Snapshot Of Terror
Adam Stacey and Eliot Ward were trapped inside the London subway yesterday but when the train doors opened, they knew what to do: snap a photograph.
"People were panicking, crying, praying," Stacey recalled. "And I turned to Eliot and said, 'Quick, take a picture.'"
The snapshot, captured on Ward's mobile phone, quickly became an iconic portrait of the attacks on London. The image, one of several to emerge from phones at the scene of the blasts, was featured prominently in TV broadcasts on the BBC and Sky News and on Web sites across the world.
Grainy images from mobile phones of Londoners caught in the attacks provided the best pictures of the chaos transpiring underground. Photo-sharing Web sites like Yahoo!'s, Flickr.com were suddenly transformed into real-time chronicles of the attacks.
Ward's photo quickly made its way from his phone to a photo-sharing site for camera phones.
"Even amid today's disaster," said Alfie Dennen, the founder of MoblogUK, "it was a fairly natural response for people to pull out their phones and take a picture."
British media organizations began soliciting mobile photographs, videos and SMS almost immediately after the attacks.
And even as photojournalists hit the streets, camera photos and video remained the most vivid illustrations of what had occurred. "Today has demonstrated why this technology is taking the reporting of tragedies like this one in a whole new direction," said Ben Wood, from mobile-phone research at Gartner in London. "It's changing the way people cover these things."
Via Forbes.
See also BBC News coverage.
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