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Poking A Moment That’s Passed
Revisiting the sequence of events that yielded the “flamethrower” photograph in Charlottesville
There was a moment in Charlottesville when an iconic photograph was made, and for the last two weeks I haven’t been able to shake it from my mind. This past weekend, thanks to a piece in the New York Times, the photograph flared-up again into national consciousness.
I wanted to put a stake in a few issues surrounding the moment, try to look deeper at how the story (and scene) has been reported, and how, even two weeks later, its meaning has a slipperiness, as if refusing its own history.
The photograph’s location. Innocuous enough. Eight steps up into the park.
I’ve never been to Charlottesville, but you get the feeling there are plenty of stories about those steps (and the park) that befit a certain kind of college town.
And yet, the steps have now acted as both stage and proscenium for two visually powerful moments; the one captured in Helber’s photo, and a second, captured on video, offering a more elongated view of the scene that enveloped the making of Helber’s photograph.
Knowledge of the existence of these two things — a photo, and a video which shows the moment in which the photo was made, was revealed over the course of two weeks. In our instant-on, streamable Now, it took a surprisingly long time to publicly connect these two pieces of media.
But back to the photo.
At 10:51AM on Saturday, August 12th, Steve Helber, based in Virginia and photographing for the Associated Press, stepped forward with his Canon EOS-1D X and took a photograph. Ten minutes later, Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe would declare a state of emergency.
Here’s the moment when Helber photographed the flame & flag. (A photographer is visible from this angle, wearing a hat. According to…
