Richard Koci Hernandez made this video asking if “mobile photography has made us more reliant on tools than on our eyes”:
Sometimes you can find smart youtube comments. For example this guy wrote:
Hernandez makes a valid point - the image shouldn’t be defined by the camera it’s captured with. It’s a shame he had to spend five minutes saying what he could easily have said in five seconds. I turned off after that - couldn’t take the pretentiousness of his language any more.
I agree with this comment more than I agree with Hernandez. He created a cool video (was it all his merit though? I see a CNN logo on the corner, and no credits for music, editing etc.), he said some interesting things but it was all ruined by his boring and pompous delivery. I also wanted the video to be at least six minutes shorter.
I have something against these video “essays”; they are very effective and I appreciate the clever editing that makes this jumble of words and illustrations and short clips flow like if it somehow makes sense.
But to me, it doesn’t. There is not much logical connection between a thought and the next. If this was a written piece I am pretty sure it couldn’t stand on its feet. I had the impression of listening to fake poetry, where words are put one after the other just because they sound good..
Anyway, what do I know, I have never been able to understand poetry.
sidenotes
Having said that, I should really go back and check some of the work that Koci Hernandez has put online. He’s incredibily productive, he’s frickin’ famous too (Emmy award winning, Pulitzer Prize nominee, assistant professor at UC Berkeley), and I hate to admit that I like some of his work (but he’s definetely too frickin’ successfull for my taste).
These are a few places that I need to (re)visit soon — and which I’d recommend to visit if you’re intrigued with the guy: