Hiroshima Trip, Post #9: Picturing the Multitude
During the Hiroshima Rally for the 2010 World Conference Against Atomic and Hydrogen bombs, as an overseas delegate I got to sit in the very front row, with a great view of every speaker who stood at the podium or almost everyone who got on stage. This meant that even with my cheap K-Mart digital camera I could still take “cool” looking shots, which would have been mediocre or impossible to discern if I had been a hundred feet or so back into the crowd. As I saw dozens of speakers cycle across the podium and dozens of activist groups from around Japan come up to present their efforts, I didn’t only take pictures of them, but also found myself taking pictures of the people who were taking pictures. For different speakers, a different, always evolving and morphing throng of people with cell phones, digital cameras and yes even disposable camera would be surging forward to get a better shot at what or who was on stage. For some there would be just a handful of picture-takers, who would l