One Second to Live

For well over a century we have been able to document, in photographs, our lives from birth to passing.  The various technologies for capturing photographic images are old enough that I have a few photographs of my great-grandparents from the late 1800s.  I also have studio photographs of my grandmother taken when she was a toddler.  Hanging in my den is a photograph I captured of my grandmother not far from the end of her life.  I possess dozens of other photos of my grandmother spanning the eighty years in-between the two photographs previously mentioned.

The emergence of digital camera technology, and especially the inclusion of cameras in cell phones, has made documenting our lives simple—if not obligatory.  Today, nearly every moment can be captured.  Increasingly, people are catching embarrassing and sometimes shocking moments.

 

I am posting a photograph taken by a man named Reynaldo Dagsa.  Mr. Dagsa, at the time he snapped the photograph, was a councilman for Caloocan City in the Philippines.  You will find Reynaldo Dagsa’s family in the foreground of the image.  The picture was taken just after midnight on New Year’s Day, 2011, during a raucous celebration.

Mr. Dagsa had about a second remaining in his life as he snapped the camera shutter.  Unwittingly, Reynaldo captured a chilling image of his assassin taking aim.  An instant after Dagsa took the photograph, the assassin fired the first of two shots.  The man about to kill Reynaldo Dagsa is braced against the automobile on the left side of the frame.

 --Mitchell Hegman