Cannes, Meshnet and Denzel

As I get older it definitely takes long for me to recover from the 12 hectic days that are Cannes International Film Festival.

I have been meaning to write this post for over a week but (excuses, excuses), I have had a lot on my plate. As I sit here at a desk in London, I decided to take a few minutes to write something short and simple, posting a my photos of an incident at the festival that got reported worldwide.

Denzel Washington’s “interaction” with a photographer.

To write this post though, I need to access my library on my Mac Studio back at home… which I am able to do now thanks to my newest discovery. Meshnet part of NordVPN.

having spent 20 years of my career in IT, I had considered setting up a home VPN in the past for accessing my library when I am travelling but it always seems too much work for the amount of time I actually need it. As I travel a lot and connect to a lot of public WiFi’s, I started using Nord a few years back to protect my connection and (hopefully) lessen the likelihood of any hacking.

I knew Meshnet was part of the package but was not really sure what it could offer until recently. You can read about the service and what it does here.. What I will say is, it works. Sitting here London I was able to remote into my Mac Studio, export the images below and send them to my laptop here for posting. So much simpler than setting up a full VPN.

So..

Denzel..

I’m not going into details about the incident, you can read all about it here.. (watch the video).

I have a sequence of 4 images. Lets look at the most widely published one first…

Looking at this single image, the incident looks way more “problematic” than if the video is viewed, or the full set of images below..

In my opinion, the final 3 images show a completely different atmosphere to the first and were the first published in isolation, the reader may form a slight different view.

As a photographer, I filed my images to my agency asap, I kept the caption as vague as possible and I informed the desk that this might be a story. The images are then distributed and which are published, with what caption and story are then beyond my control. The publisher can put whatever spin on the story they wish and it is up to their journalist(s) to gather the information to write an accurate story. By the time this is happening, at an event like Cannes, like all the other photographers, I am off to the next job.

The next day, we (photographers) were discussing the incident and viewing photos. When I showed that first image, one photographer’s initial reaction was “it’s photoshopped” (he did not know I had taken it). The hand in the face I captured (the only photo I have seen that captures that moment) was part of Denzel pushing the photographer back. It was a fraction of a second and as such (I feel), can been thought to mis-represent the incident.

My job is to file it. It happened. Is it fair that this photo is used on its own?

So the point of this post, what are your thoughts?

Until Next Time

J