Grief in the News

The big image on the front page of today’s New York Times and similar image on the front page of the newspaper’s Metro section are studies in grief—and studies in the ways photographs deliver the emotional dimension of the news. They are both powerful documents, but, like all news photos, they each have a limited vocabulary.

The top photo shows Ester Miller, one of the over 500 people who sued the Los Angeles archdiocese over sexual abuse. A judge had just ordered a $660 million settlement in the case. In the picture (made by Monica Almeida for the Times) Miller holds a photo of the priest accused of abusing her.

The second photo shows the Tatyana Timoshenko, mother of NYPD officer Russell Timoshenko, who recently died after being shot in the line of duty. In the photo, was taken by Uli Seit for the Times, Timoshenko is comforted by her husband, Leonid, while Patrick Lynch of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association looks on.

What is it that we learn from these pictures? What function do they perform? How do they enrich our understanding or experience of the two stories? The questions seem obvious, which is all the more reason to ask them. The answers shed light on the very nature of photography and why we still find it so fascinating.

As deeply as photographs like these move us, they provide a very limited range of understanding. They are placed in newspapers and magazines under the old-fashioned assumption that a single image is worth a thousand words. But as the late John Szarkowski once wrote, the thousand words that pictures are worth are mostly nouns and adjectives, whereas a real story requires verbs.

Photographs, mere slices of moments, imply a narrative—you look at a picture like the grieving mother of Russell Timoshenko and you know that there was a moment before the image was made and a moment after. But implying a narrative is not the same as telling a complete story. To do that, you need a caption, at the very least. The caption supplies the verbs, or should.

The old photo magazines like Life understood the limitations of the single image to tell a story. They adopted the idea of the photo essay—combining multiple pictures or picture sequences to form a narrative. To my mind the photo essay wasn’t much of a success—the power still resided in the quality of the individual images, and the magazines still needed to provide captions to turn the images into a story.

I hear from a lot of photojournalists today who lament the fact that newspapers and magazines today use images merely as “wallpaper” or decoration for words. The problem today isn’t really they way images are used, but the way the words are written. Photographs, with their emotional power and their ability to draw readers into a story, should more often be the starting point for writers. This is something that Life magazine did get right. It was a Life magazine veteran, Sydney L. James, who, when he was appointed managing editor of the new Sports Illustrated, advised reporters to “write into the picture.” He said it over and over. The photo was where the story begins, so begin there. Begin writing in that moment. James understood that while a photo cannot tell a story, it nonetheless can define the meaning of a story, instantly. 
--David Schonauer