The Washington Post on Thursday had a story about tuition protests in London that turned violent, illustrated with this photo:
Nine leading papers in the UK used a photo taken by another photographer from the same angle. Your paper, if you have one and it covers international news, probably used one of these two as well.
It’s a good photo, capturing the rage of the student protesters, and you can imagine the seething mob behind this guy, waiting for their chance to stream in and start the looting. But the BBC has posted a wider-angle shot of this scene:
The mobs of protesters are there, in the background, but it’s a mob of photographers who are arrayed around the guy doing the smashing. It’s a reminder of how photographs can be deceiving, and of how journalists can influence the story they’re covering: one has to wonder whether the protester would be going to all this trouble if he didn’t have such a big audience of cameras.
Like many people, I subscribe to more magazines than I can always keep up with. I do the best I can, but inevitably the issues start to pile up waiting to be read. Eventually the triage begins: I realize that I am too far behind to be able to read them all, and I start scanning the covers for the issues with articles that interest me. The ones that don't make the cut go into the "guilt" pile, where I pretend for a while that I will get around to reading them, before giving up and tossing them, unread, into the recycling bin.
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