Genre

From the PDN One Life Photo Contest.

To Crop History

"The advent of digital photography and the proliferation of instant images have dulled the power of historical photos against the steady and relentless 24-hour drumbeat of the “breaking story” syndrome, which holds publications and networks hostage to the relentless demands of feeding the News Monster. It doesn’t help to have the photos misrepresented on top of that"

David Hume Kennerly is pissed that Newsweek cropped his photo.

Point and Shoot: How the Abu Ghraib Images Redefine Photography (2005)

I remember seeing this image for the first time in the New Yorker. At the time, I got most of my news from the radio and hadn't seen any of the images reported to be coming from soldiers at Abu Ghraib. I just opened the magazine to this image, and I remembered being utterly astounded. I had no language to describe what I was seeing. It was as Barthes famously noted, a truly "traumatic" image. I thought it was some bizarre kind of art image, but too far outside artistic convention. I only realized what it was when I finally read the caption.

Andy Grunberg in 2005 wrote an excellent analysis of these images and I was reminded of it while visiting Doug Rickard's intriguing site, American Suburb X.

Read the article here.

You can also see the slide show from the New Yorker where I copied accompanying image.