The photog took his camera's memory card to the Post, and left it with them, so they could search the FIFTY photographs he ended up with from constantly signaling the conductor for signs of the perpetrator of the crime.What? That doesn't make sense as an excuse. I'm not saying he needs an excuse, but it's apparently being used as one, and it doesn't make sense as one. You take potential evidence of a crime to the police, not to some shitty yellow journalism tabloid.
Mr. Abbasi said he was wearing a 20-odd pound backpack of camera gear for an assignment, and was standing near the 47th Street entrance to the platform when he saw the man fall on the tracks. “Nobody helped,” he said. “People started running away.”posted by tzikeh at 7:17 AM on December 5, 2012 [1 favorite]
“I saw the lights in the distance,” signaling a subway’s approach, he said, so he started firing off flashes on the camera — 49 times in all, he said — as a means of warning the driver.
“I was not aiming to take a photograph of the man on the track,” he said, later adding that his arm was fully outstretched, the camera far from his face.
“If I had reached him in time, I would have pulled him up,” he said. At one point, the man said to have shoved Mr. Han came toward Mr. Abbasi, he said, so he backed up against a wall, still flashing his camera. He estimated the victim was on the tracks for 10 or 15 seconds before he was struck.
According to a Post video segment, Abbasi, who waiting for the subway on an unrelated assignment when Han was pushed off the platform, was not ?strong enough to physically lift the victim himself,? and so chose to use ?the only resources available to him, and began rapidly flashing his camera to signal the train conductor to stop.? This image, then, is ostensibly a dark serendipity, an accidental artifact delivered by happenstance from the ether.So, really, it's a worse excuse than "the camera was already in my hands," but better than "I was trying to get a cover photo."
Before I went into the subway, I had been up in Times Square, and my camera was still set for outside lighting. The flash was on 1/64th of a second, which would be split-second recharging.posted by tzikeh at 7:23 AM on December 5, 2012 [5 favorites]
People think I had time to set the camera and take photos, and that isn’t the case. I just ran toward that train.
The sad part is, there were people who were close to the victim, who watched and didn’t do anything. You can see it in the pictures.
The truth is I could not reach that man; if I could have, I would have.
But the train was moving faster than I could get there.”
"It is the one great weakness of journalism as a picture of our modern existence, that it must be a picture made up entirely of exceptions. We announce on flaring posters that a man has fallen off a scaffolding. We do not announce on flaring posters that a man has not fallen off a scaffolding. Yet this latter fact is fundamentally more exciting, as indicating that the moving tower of terror and mystery, a man, is still abroad upon the earth. That the man has not fallen off a scaffolding is really more sensational; and it is also some thousand times more common. But journalism cannot reasonably be expected thus to insist upon the permanent miracles. Busy editors cannot be expected to put on their posters, ‘Mr. Wilkinson Still Safe,’ or ‘Mr. Jones, of Worthing, Not Dead Yet.’ They cannot announce the happiness of mankind at all. They cannot describe all the forks that are not stolen, or all the marriages that are not judiciously dissolved. Hence the complete picture they give of life is of necessity fallacious; the can only represent what is unusual. However democratic they may be, they are only concerned with the minority."posted by Sticherbeast at 9:52 AM on December 5, 2012 [16 favorites]
You can turn the track power off if it is necessary in an emergency. For example, if a person has fallen to the tracks or someone is caught in the door of a car and the train starts moving, you should cut the track power. Go to the nearest Emergency Power Cut Cabinet. There is one at each end of every subway/RT platform; it is marked by a blue light. The instructions on the panel will show you how to cut the power to tracks in both directions.There are some very narrow platforms in Toronto, like Eglinton station, where you have less than six feet of space between the wall and the open track. These are not fun to negotiate during rush hour.
Beyond the pitched cries of editorial impropriety, however, perhaps it’s not all clear what the subway photo is really about. When you think about it, for example, what the photo offers is not the story of what happened so much as its consequence. What’s missing in the photo is “the perp,” the push — the event which resulted in the horrible result we’re exposed to above. There is video of arguing, but the infamous photo itself is almost deafeningly solitary, as if Mr. Han got himself in this death trap alone. Thus, if there’s a deeper critique of the photo, it’s that the catalyst and real subject of concern is missing.posted by tonycpsu at 2:30 PM on December 5, 2012
A New York City man was pushed to his death in front of a subway train in the Sunnyside neighborhood of Queens, police said, in the second such fatality this month.
The victim was sent tumbling onto the tracks into the path of a No. 7 train shortly after 8 p.m. Dec. 27 at the subway stop at Queens Boulevard and 40th Street, said Paul Browne, a spokesman for the New York City Police Department.
Police identified the victim as Sunando Sen, 46, a native of India who lived in Queens and had a printing business in New York City. He had no family in New York, according to police, who said they were still trying to contact his relatives.
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It was worth a try, I guess.
Plan B: Sell the "faces of death" shot to the New York Post.
posted by Egg Shen at 6:53 AM on December 5, 2012 [3 favorites]