Charles Apple

I feel bad complaining about it, too, because I praised a handful of papers Thursday for making the gutsy choice to show dead bodies. But today, it just seems so…

Common? Is that the word I’m looking for?

Consider, for example, the front of today’s New York Times:

Oh, it’s a nice enough shot by the Times‘ Damon Winter. But the photo conveys neither the emotion nor the scale of the disaster in Haiti. Three days after the event, I don’t see the point of putting it on page one.

I could make the same case for this shocking photo afront today’s Washington Post, shot by the Post’s Carol Guzy:

A loyal blog reader e-mailed me this morning:

Did anyone think the 1A Washington Post photo was powerful yet a tad much?

My penny thought: I think every other photo we’ve seen is shot like you’re on the outside looking in. This one has a kid looking out right at the photographer/reader, making you a part of what he is next to.

That, and I think not seeing head on a child is quite disturbing.

I’ll spare you a closer look. But the picture is of a young man, crawling out of a hole in the rubble. He’s working to help free a teacher who was trapped when a school collapsed. The body beside him is that of a little girl who was killed when the concrete roof crushed her head to her desk.

For Day Three coverage, it seems a little late to go with body photos. Especially given the tropical climate in Haiti. After the coverage Thursday that focused on dead, dying and anguished, I’d prefer to see photos of people being helped or fed or cared for.

Of course, perhaps that’s the point. Perhaps there isn’t enough of that going on.

Neither of these presentations appeal to me. The Times front strikes me as too little, too late. The Post photo hits me emotionally. But it’s a dull blow after the powerful pictures I saw yesterday.

No, what’s called for today, perhaps, is something that gives us an idea at to the scale of the disaster.

That’s why I was drawn to this picture — and, arguably, it’s even more macabre:

The only thing I can think of when I see this is that scene from Gone With the Wind when the camera pulls back to reveal hundreds upon hundreds of war casualties, spread out in the streets of Atlanta.

Except these aren’t injured soldiers. These are dead people.

Yeah. That’s scale.

Four other papers used that shot — by Ariana Cubillos of the Associated Press — out front today: The Day of New London, Conn., the Press-Telegram of Long Beach, Calif., the Seattle Times and the Portland Oregonian (click any for a larger look):

Even at thumbnail size, you can spot right away the mistake by Long Beach and Seattle: If you’re going to have the courage to run a photo like this atop page one, then why not go for maximum impact and play it across all six columns?

Long Beach gets bonus points, however, for the brilliant headline. It matches the photo perfectly. Unspeakable horror indeed…

Slightly less effective, I think, is this similar shot by the AP’s Greg Bull and used on page one by a number of papers: the Gainesville Sun, the Lakeland Ledger, the Palm Beach Post — all three of Florida — and the Morning Call of Allentown, Pa.  (again, click either for a larger view):

The Times-Picayune of New Orleans used the same shot but used it way too small:

Only four columns? Oh, come on…

A similar photo by the same photographer led the front of today’s Philadelphia Inquirer…

And yet another similar AP photo — used out front by yet another Florida paper, the St. Petersburg Times — seems even more gruesome.

Perhaps it’s because of the lower angle the photographer took. But you really see the arms and legs frozen in rigor mortis here. Hey, show me the horror and the scale. But details like this, I don’t need.

This shot by Juan Barreto of Getty Images afront the Albany Times Union was also taken from much too low an angle. But at least it doesn’t emphasize the details seen in that last shot:

Of all the papers using photos of stacked bodies today, the best presentations I saw was by the San Jose Mercury News.

We see the horror on the face of the man searching for the remains of his family, covering his nose as the bodies decay in the hot sun. Even better, though, we see the hundreds of bodies and we get the feeling of the enormity of it all. Yet, the bodies are in slightly softer focus — because the photographer — the aforementioned Damon Winter of the NYT — concentrated on the man in the foreground.

Hurray for a shorter depth-of-field.

The Star Bulletin of Honolulu used the same picture:

The effectiveness was undermined slightly by the smirking Bill Cosby in the upper right ear, offering “insight amid laughs.” In light of the “Untold anguish,” perhaps Bill should have stayed off of A1 today.

Yesterday, I reminded you about the phenomenon I call regional twins — when papers with adjacent or overlapping circulation areas choose the same photo as lede art and play it in a similar way.

We see such a thing today in Detroit…

…and we had triplets in Virginia today:

And speaking of that photo — shot by Gerald Herbert of the Associated Press — we found 64 — count ‘em, sixty-four — newspapers at the Newseum today that built their front pages around that very picture. (Click any for a larger view):

That’s either a mind-numbing affirmation that, sure enough, all U.S. newspapers look the same these days. Or it’s encouraging proof that 64 newspapers can each achieve a relatively different look while using the same art. Depending on your mood.

Find the Newseum’s own Top Ten pages of the day here. Read Mario Garcia’s take on Haiti coverage here.

Go here to read a Q&A with New York Times photog Damon Winter about his work this week in Haiti. An excerpt:

There was one thing that didn’t really make pictures. It was my first night here last night. We were staying at a hotel on the edge of a pretty heavily damaged neighborhood and at night, you could hear people singing.

People are out on the street at night. It’s really hard to photograph because there’s no electricity. It’s pitch black. But all night you could hear them singing prayers. It’s pretty amazing the ways that people are dealing with this tragedy. It says a lot about the Haitian character. They are an amazing people.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 15th, 2010 at 12:17 pm and is filed under A look at the day's fronts, Innovative ideas, News design, Photojournalism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.