
The iPhone at the Deathbed - bookofjoe
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/18/style/iphone-death-portraits.html
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kiliantics
Weird, I had just discovered the subreddit /r/lastimages before checking HN
and this article shows up. It's a morbidly fascinating view into people's very
personal relationships with now-deceased friends and family. Made possible by
the ubiquity of cameras today.

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RickJWagner
I'd just like to point out that there is a gratuitous swipe at a prominent
politician in this piece. Of course it is wholly out of place, and should have
been edited out in a piece of true journalism.

Regardless of your political leanings, it is astonishing to see how much time
and energy is dispatched each day trying to push an opinion on an unwilling
audience. One day soon, this will be known as the golden age of media
propaganada.

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jrockway
It was a direct quote from a source.

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RickJWagner
Yes, true.

But it was unnecessary for the story-- it added nothing. I'm sure the author
had many more quotes from many of the subjects, yet not all were chosen to
print.

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SpicyLemonZest
Selecting quotes for a nonpolitical story based on political considerations
would be terribly agenda-driven journalism.

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mynameishere
But that's why the quote was included. Who are you arguing with?

Newspapers do this sort of thing all the time. If some source used the phrase
"latest Obama atrocity" the NY Times would never use that phrase--unless they
framed it in a way to destroy the person making the quote. I don't get upset
about this. It's just how journalism is.

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SpicyLemonZest
I don't think that's true, although I unfortunately don't have any good ideas
for how to prove it.

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United857
When I first read the headline, I thought the article was about how the iPhone
itself was dying.

I'm surprised to see the NY Times have such clickbait-ish headlines. Mods,
maybe change the title on HN?

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jbob2000
Yeah that title is a complete lie, the article has absolutely nothing to do
with iphones.

It’s also a dumb article. People are taking pictures of their dead loved ones
and posting it to Facebook. This is... news?

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danso
I’ve seen candid photos of people at their death bed, but it was usually done
by people who were professional photographers, and often part of a photo
feature essay. The phenomenon of regular people having a high quality camera
at every moment in their lives, and a network to immediately disseminate such
photos without a gatekeeper, is most certainly a relatively new phenomenon.

Just the other week I saw someone who had posted a candid photo of him and his
dying girlfriend at the hospital on Reddit. He was ridiculed and the thread
was deleted, but not before someone had screenshotted it and posted it on
Twitter to mock. Seeing death in public is still an uncommon thing.

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Swizec
Victorian death photography was a thing. Before cameras were cheap, people
used to get photos taken of their dead loved ones because it was literally the
only photo they would ever have of that person and they wanted to cherish the
memory.

Often these photos would be taken as a group family picture.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-
mortem_photography](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-mortem_photography)

> Post-mortem photography was very common in the nineteenth century when
> "death occurred in the home and was quite an ordinary part of life."[3] As
> photography was a new medium, it is plausible that "many daguerreotype post-
> mortem portraits, especially those of infants and young children, were
> probably the only photographs ever made of the sitters. The long exposure
> time made deceased subjects easy to photograph.'

> In the Victorian era it was not uncommon to photograph deceased young
> children or newborns in the arms of their mother. The inclusion of the
> mother, it has been argued, encourages one to see through the mother's eyes

