I’ve been doing a project which has required me to look through all the photos on my computer. I have digital pictures going back around 20 years, and there must be around 10,000-20,000. This isn’t a particularly special collection - just pictures of family, scenery, etc. I figure my numbers are probably typical for most people who take photos regularly - that works out to 2-5 pictures a day.
But then I got to thinking - if you took celebrities at the height of their fame, but before the invent of digital cameras, and in particular phones with cameras, how many pictures would have been taken of them. So let’s take the Beatles, while they were a band. How many photos were taken of them? Is it likely more or less than I have of my family? Kind of crazy to think that it might be less, but that’s my gut feeling.
Well, Getty Images alone has 28,211. I imagine that there were hundreds of thousands of different photos of them. It is a interesting question though. I often wonder how much footage there would be if the JFK assassination happened today. Not just the Zapruder film.
Hell, so much has changed since 2001 that even 9/11 would have a much bigger photo/video record. We have very little footage of the first plane striking the tower. If smartphones had been as ubiquitous as they are now, we’d probably even have had footage from inside the planes posted by the passengers before impact (assuming the hijackers didn’t turn off the onboard wifi).
In May 1968, the Rolling Stones played three songs at the end of the annual New Musical Express Poll Winner’s Concert at Wembley Stadium in London. This was a huge annual event anyway, with all kinds of top performers, but this time it was especially huge — the Stones hadn’t played live that year at all (and wouldn’t again for another year), but were at the peak of their power and fame (they’d just released the “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” single).
Hard-core Stones fans were thrilled when, a couple years ago, 20 seconds of grainy film footage (no sound) showed up in someone’s attic.
That’s it. We have no other record other than still photos from newspapers. (The show was broadcast on British TV, and that was likely taped, but the tape was wiped later, as per standard practice).
If such an event happened today, there would be at least a thousand smartphone sound recordings.
It probably adds a lot to the total but still tons of still photos taken. In addition to all the professional photographers more onlookers clicked on Instamatics and old brownie type cameras still common at the time, and some number of Poloroids too. Offseting those were the Super 8 movies taken by fans, and then all the video frames too. I’m sure the stills taken number in the millions before adding in individual motion picture frames.
Imagine if the UFOs came back today. There would be millions of super-clear cellphone photos of them…
As for the Beatles, I’m sure there would be a lot of selfies they took themselves, but as for public photos… They pretty much got photographed everywhere they went already. There’d be more of them, but do we really need more?
Back in the film era, folks only took pictures of scenes or events they considered somehow notable… but attending a Beatles concert, or meeting them anywhere else, would count as notable. Surely, if you own a camera and you’re going to a Beatles concert, there would be a good chance that you’d bring your camera, and take at least a few shots. And each of their events would have thousands of spectators: Even if only a few percent brought cameras, that could still be a hundred people or more taking pictures, in a single day. And probably some of those would take multiple pictures.
Balancing that, of course, is the fact that they weren’t performing every day. But the paparazzi predate digital photography, and the number of pictures taken of them when they weren’t performing was probably at least comparable to the number of selfies a modern person takes.
Even in the film era, photographers could burn through a lot of film. According to Vanity Fair, paparazzo Ron Galella took over three million photos by himself. Hell, the photographer at my wedding probably took more than a hundred shots of my wife and me. (We didn’t keep them all, but we did spend an entire evening looking through the proofs.)
Not to mention with Linda McCartney and Yoko Ono both working in photography, imagine how many Beatles photos those two alone took.
So if the issue was the amount of film and the cost, that was very little concern to pro photographers.
What I remember wondering about was the stadium concerts where someone famous comes on stage and the audience becomes a sea of flashcubes going off. Odds are most of those were instamatic cameras, so from a hundred feet away, the performer would not be more than a blur and the flash itself was useless (but the stage lighting was likely more than sufficient).
You still see it today only it’s those tiny LED emitters on smartphone cameras. I wonder today as I wondered back then: Just how powerful do people think those things are, anyway?
I was joking. People are claiming UFO’s are back, but despite hundreds of millions of high definition cameras at the ready, all we get are the same amorphous blobs and blinking lights,
You don’t need WiFi to send a picture or video from a cell phone; that can be done using its usual data plan with the carrier. (Even back in 2001, I think many passengers on the hijacked planes had the foresight to take their cell phones out of flight mode in order to make voice calls to relatives or to the authorities.)
There would also be livestreams of people sending their good-byes, by the thousands. I hope there’s no event in the future where people have a chance to do that.
As a longtime R.E.M. fan, I’m glad there’s no known video footage of Bill Berry collapsing onstage from a brain aneurysm. Granted, he did make a swift and complete recovery, BUT were something like that to happen now, it would be all over YouTube right away. I thought of this because with the 30th anniversary of “Automatic For The People,” which many people consider their best album (I respectfully disagree; for me, it’s “Murmur”) I’m seeing a boatload of pictures from that era that I’ve never seen before. Here’s one featuring Peter Buck, and I’m pretty sure the upside-down guy is their manager, Bertis Downs.
Same phenomenon I saw in the Cathedrals and Museums of Europe 10 or 20 years ago. The average tourist had no idea how to turn off their flash and so many museums and art galleries resorted to banning photos entirely. I remember the dire warnings posted in the one wing of the Louvre against photos. The next day, we went to see the Mona Lisa and dozens of flashes were going off in front of an oblivious security guard, until another appeared and started warning people.
Modern smartphones are anything but. they will often refuse to take a picture without the flash, even if the tiny subject is adequately lit but in a large black background (and then refuse to focus). So it’s a race to stupidity, who is less capable - the photographer or the camera?
Although I must confess I too occasionally missed the “turn off flash” option.
