Certain stories and photographs have a feel about them that I find incredibly intriguing. I’ll try to describe it, and then I hope to provide illuminating examples.
It is a sense of secrecy that accompanies certain images and reports. It’s the sort of secrecy that is associated with conspiracies, hidden tests, and secret laboratories. Often the pictures are in black and white, and they tend to be a little grainy. That’s about the best I can do. Let me give a few examples of photographs that I think have this “feel”:
The photographs of this disaster show it clearly. The two that strike me the most are the colour shot of people trying to escape the flames (a little over halfway down) and the one after it, of the rocket’s wreckage.
The second Resident Evil movie gave off this feel a lot in the beginning, when they showed the Umbrella Corporation laboratories beneath Racoon City and in the brief images of the Nemesis Project’s creation.
Evangelion became more and more “conspiracy-like,” especially in their descriptions of the disasterous Antarctica expedition that triggered the Second Impact. The defining image (“feel”-wise) is the second-long shot of Adam as the shining giant.
The brief “photograph” of Principal Scudworth and his robot butler carrying a skeleton in the opening credits of the cancelled Clone High T.V. show.
Can anyone sympathise with me? Do you get that same fascinated chill when you encounter something like this?
It makes me think that the photos were taken so hastily as to never be clear enough to get the “truth” from the shot. It’s also a feeling of…loneliness, I guess. Like the photographer will never be able to get anyone to believe his story, or he was “eliminated” before the whole story could be told, so we just get a suggestion of what actually happened.
I know that feeling, too. I’ve never tried to put it into words, but it’s a kind of sad grandeur, a sense of humans being doomed as a group, futile struggling, fate…
I wonder if its anything like the feeling I always get when I gaze into fenced-off military bases (often derelict ones); there’s just something about them that tugs at my gut in a way I can’t put into words.
I’m glad to see I’m not the only one. It has a majesty about it, but not a glorious one. A dark one–a glimpse into a world that “never existed”, maybe. I don’t know.
I think it’s almost a sense of knowing something that, maybe, you’re not supposed to know about for some reason. Here’s this picture that was taken in haste, from far off, without enough time to give thought to composition or quality. It’s eerie, it’s foriegn, and there’s some authoritative aspect to it.
