Well, as you can see from the photograph below, things got totally out of hand at the St Patrick’s Day parade here in Cork earlier.
Moments later, he was gone. (c) Roger Overall 2010
A massive crocodile escaped from the secret zoology labs at UCC and went on the rampage, encouraged by one of Cork’s traffic wardens – that’s her with the sword. Police fired tear gas, but to no avail.
This press photographer tried to get a close up photograph using a wide-angle lens and a flash gun.
He was eaten.
I’ll spare you the photograph of that.
…
OK, OK … It didn’t happen.
If truth be told, the secret giant UCC reptiles almost never escape.
There is, though, a serious point to this. In fact, there are two.
1) A documentary photographer is constantly editing reality. This can be done to show the subject in a benign light, or in a negative one. The photograph above shows by far the most original float in the parade. It was fabulous. But it never set off in pursuit of the photographer. He simply turned away at the right moment to give me this shot. The smoke is from the float itself – a special effect. There’s a lesson here. You have to be careful how you photograph things – people just might believe what they think they’re seeing.
2) The second point is this: photographs are not worth a thousand words. Often, photographs are incomprehensible without a caption. You need to understand the context to fully appreciate many documentary pictures. Not always, sure, but you often have to supply words to give the viewer the complete picture – if you’ll forgive the pun. Imagine if you’d only seen the photograph above without any explanation. You’d have no idea what was happening.
And you’d never know about UCC’s covert reptile programme.
