piecing together fragments.

Living in Kings Cross you’d think I might have been alerted to news quicker on thursday but I, like many (without the radio or tv on), initially found out through fragmented emails, texts and calls from people wondering if I was ok. "Hi. Yes, I'm ok. Why...? Oh... what!" Questions from family, close friends and distant acquaintances from all over the world streamed through my (slowing) internet connection and mobile phone. (A few calls could get through but texts arrived in intense bursts).

Meanwhile, I frantically googled for any information and found little available on news sites at that time. Flickr members, however, were responding quickly. I joined in, adding some shots of my street - so eerily quiet, despite becoming increasingly packed with people having been evacuated from offices but unable to go anywhere in the blocked off area. Very quickly I was invited to join a Flickr group pool - 7/7 Community/London Bomb Blast and from there information unfolded at a rapid pace.

It soon became obvious how desperate everyone else was for information and also the amazing collage of news flickr members were collectively able to assemble. Within minutes the group pool membership grew from the 10's to the hundreds and I was astounded to find that within a very short time some of my pictures had close to 10,000 views. (I compare this to my average image views which can be roughly counted on two hands).

Hundreds of photos, like mine, began to document the mundane, the ordinary, the unsensational yet unsettled city in the hours that followed Thursday morning. We couldn’t see anything - it was all below ground or restricted from public view. Yet these images tell stories of a different type of chaos, of anxiety, of tension. Images of course don't have to capture action to talk of these things. A quiet sense of unease, of sadness and desperation pervades many of them. We see a pedestrianised city, clusters of people waiting, walking, talking, asking. We see worried faces, tense bodies. We see streets devoid of cars, absent of buses. We see the blurs of speeding emergency vehicles and tangles of police tape. We see signs on closed shops, closed streets, closed tubes. We see our familiar city somehow shifted, disrupted, changed.

The flickr group used (and are still using) the photo pool to try to make sense of Thursday - and not just with individual personal photos but with snippets of information in many forms. Throughout the day, the temporal trajectory of news and information from a variety of 'official' news and other sources can be mapped according to the uploaded files. Members took screen grabs and images from an electic range of local and global blogs, online news sites, tv reports and newspapers - creating a media collage that blurs the personal and professional, the private and public, the individual and community. By interrupting, picking and filtering 'established' or 'official' media channels it mediates a collective representation of news that attempted to present the stories, the personal experiences and the multiple realities of many of us.