Like untold numbers of spontaneously shot smartphone videos, Paul Ferdinand Ayorbaba’s most recent was not a work of art, full of the backs of heads and the constant bobbing and disorientating pans and zooms that are a signature of mass digital culture.
But its mundane details have been transformed by tragedy into something deeply chilling — the last images of some of the 189 people who perished in terrifying circumstances little more than an hour after the video was shot.
Just minutes after takeoff, their Lion Air flight plunged into the Java Sea, tearing apart the plane and the people in it.
Ayorbaba traveled frequently within Indonesia on business and the boarding video was perhaps meant to comfort his wife, Inchy Ayorbaba, who felt a little anxious about the trip to an outlying island he’d never visited
“It was his last contact with me, his last message to me,” she said in an interview with Indonesian TV at a police hospital where she’d taken their three children for DNA tests to help with victim identification.
