The Outer Shell

The Outer Shell

1988 4 April 19 The Outer Shell (395) When a military coup was attempted on August 28, 1987, in the Philippines, the Time office in Seoul immediately received the information by telephone, whereupon a three-man team of Time photographers were flown to Manila, the capital of the Philippines. There they took up-to-the-minute pictures to illustrate the Time cover on the abortive coup against the government of President Corazon Aquino. Even while shooting was still going on in the streets of Manila, batches of film were being flown back to Seoul.

A selection was first made of the photographs that most dramatically illustrated what was happening in the Philippine capital. Then in a photographic laboratory in Seoul, a team of technicians began the high-tech wizardry of transmitting the colour pictures to New York City. Each picture was first converted into millions of computer digits, and that information was stored on tape. Then it was beamed via satellite to the Time Impact (for Image Processing and Colour Transmission) Centre in New York City. The manager there received the data on tape and entered the information in Time’s computer system. Finally a high-resolution picture was printed, and the photograph that had been selected could be seen within an hour of its having left Seoul. Within a few days, the unsuccessful coup, along with all the pictures, was before the readers of Time. Time ends its report (7 September 1987) on the coverage of this incident with these words:

‘The best photo in the world is no good if it is still in somebody’s camera’ (p. 3).

Recent advances in Science and Technology have made it possible to publish pictures of important events with great rapidity. But the very best pictures that this human invention, the camera, can take will show us only external appearances. What the best pictures in the world ought to show us are man’s quest for truth, the soul’s trembling at the remembrance of God, the killing of the ego in order to accept the truth. If we are not destined to see ‘such pictures, it is not because they are “still in somebody’s camera,” but because no such camera has yet been devised which will portray for us these galvanizing inner realities. We must always remember that, no matter how faithfully – from the visual point of view – personalities and events are depicted by photography, what we see is only the outer shell.