My local supermarket has a newspaper stand displaying the seven major national dailies and last Friday (20 February) all their front pages had the SAME photograph. Now, there have been occasions when all the front-page photographs have been taken of the same event, person or incident, but I cannot remember all of them using the same image.
As we know Phil Noble’s unique single frame went viral around the world and has produced hundreds of transmutations into of gifs and memes on social media. It’s even ended up hung in the Louvre!
Ironically, Phil stated that technically “it was far from my best”, but it was by far the most important photograph he, or any pro is likely to make in their lifetimes.
For me, this flags up a question: what particular quality does it have that persuaded thousands of editors to choose it and millions of people globally to share it on social media? It certainly captured that decisive moment, notably defined by Henri Cartier Bresson, who also said: “Sharpness is a bourgeois concept”. He meant, of course, that obsessing over technical perfection and image sharpness is less important than capturing the emotion, composition, and the “decisive moment”.
Well, this graphically captured the emotion. It is etched on the former prince’s face, and it is a monumentally important decisive moment in British history as commentators and historians have been explaining to us over the airwaves and on news pages ever since it was published. The arrest has been commented on by constitutional experts and through marketplace ‘vox pops’ on TV, but none of those audio-visual outcomes have the same impact of this single image.
I was taken aback, like many, at the snapped image of Andrew on all fours hovering over a young woman discovered in the Epstein Files. For me, it was made even more sinister by the on-camera flash reflected by the retinas in his eyeballs. The same photographic phenomenon occurred in Phil’s image made outside a Norfolk police station, but he is no snapper of kinky parties and almost certainly knew that his on-camera strobe flash would result in red-eye and unpredictable results. He took six frames and only one was useable.
Having been in similar situations during my press career in the last century, I would not know if I’d got anything at all until the negatives had come out of the hypo in the mobile darkroom. These were situated in the local telephone exchange which was the favoured location as the photos had to be wired to London via the phone system. This was long before the Internet. Nowadays, you know instantaneously what you’ve got.
“It was a pinch me moment when I looked at the back screen”, remarked Phil.
Although there was a strong element of luck in the making of this picture, there are decades of professional experience that go into being that lucky. This was far from being just a happy accident. It proves that to produce what we used to call in my press days a lasting photograph it must be unique or ‘different’ whether that was accidental, due to superb technique, or the result of the maker’s originality.
Whether you look glance at the multiple representations of this image on the newspaper stands as you go shopping, or study it more forensically, it is obvious it has metaphoric connotations as well as recording one of the most historically important British events to have taken place during the 200 years of photography.
The most ‘lasting’ photographs stay in your mind because the external and the internal co-exists and transcend technical imperfections.
We engage with such images, whatever the context, because nothing like it has happened before and a photographer was there to take a unique and memorable picture that we can all share in. Those photographs reside in our memory banks forever. And this is one of those and no other medium can do that.
And no amount of AI scraping will ever produce a photograph like Phil’s or go viral as his has. How do I know that?
Well, I put this into ChatGPT:
Produce a photo of a former prince in the back seat of a police car where photographer is using on-camera flash
Related reading:
- 20 astonishing press photos from Trump’s first tumultuous year back in power
- Are these photos Russia or America? You’ll probably guess wrong!
- Seeking the ‘perfect’ photo backfired for the Princess of Wales
