The BAG, on the other hand, has been particularly attentive to World Trade Center imagery, whether for political or commercial use. I accept that the director and the majority of those who developed this film brought to it the highest ideals and best of intentions.... From the trailer and,...
Continue ReadingAs soon as I saw the first image (a NYT photo from "Lohengrin," the production currently playing at the Metropolitan Opera), it reminded me of the second. The second image -- which has been all over cyberspace -- was shot in the holy city of Mashhad and distributed by Mehr,...
Continue ReadingI don't blame Michelle for posting this shot of the new White House Press Secretary on Tuesday. Because Tony Snow's appointment was still a rumor at that point, Malkin disclosed straight away that the image came from the right-wing photoshop factory. I think the image says a few things...
Continue ReadingAm I overthinking this? Today, Michelle Malkin posted this image on her website followed by the simple phrase: "Does this image bring back memories?" She then noted how, thirty years to the day, outfielder Rick Monday secured his place in baseball history by snatched away this flag "in order to...
Continue ReadingA number of you wrote about this lead photo in yesterday's NYT. The image shows George Bush in a marine lunch line in Twenty-Nine Palms, California. Because Bush is chumming it up with the white soldier, while the (lone) black soldier next to Bush seems miles away (and less interested...
Continue ReadingI'm not the biggest Bush fan.... Now, does anybody think -- even for a second -- that I couldn't post the cover to Neil Young's "impeachment" album? That said, the visual -- like everything else that shows up here -- suggests some interesting interpretation. On this one, though, The...
Continue ReadingYou can boil down yesterday's lead NYT Week In Review article to one question: how important is fear in mobilizing concern for global warming? (Of course, images provide much of the raw material behind this debate.) I didn't appreciate it before, but the April 3rd TIME cover (with the polar...
Continue ReadingThis was the speech where Bush dedicated most of his time time belaboring some irrelevant personal interest stories from Tal Afar while completely ignoring the fact the rest of the country was coming unglued. Picking the one image I thought best characterized the event, my write-up for Huffington Post...
Continue ReadingActually showing their pictures Two Ex - Generals Come to Rumsfeld's Defense http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Rumsfeld.html not link gened.
Continue ReadingIt's just one simple article, but this plaintive story about a group of U.S. Special Forces in Afghanistan seems to reveal the true futility of whatever it was Bush/Rumsfeld originally had in mind.... It's the accompanying article that about the stymied efforts of an American , expresses in a...
Continue ReadingTight shot - Reuters Sami Salim Hamad, a militant from Islamic Jihad, poses with a weapon during his last testimony in this image taken from video footage made available on April 17, 2006.
Continue ReadingHonestly, I was hard pressed to identify "better" or "worse" images from the trailer for "An Inconvenient Truth."... With the Katrina disaster fresh in mind, the hyper-spinning hurricane on the thermal weather tracker is pretty nerve wracking, as are the pinned back palm trees and the slamming, crashing wave...
Continue ReadingAs the Telegraph points out (link), lesbian and gay families on Monday encountered probably the most disarming enforcers the White House has ever employed. If you were following Easter's edition of the culture wars, you might have heard how gay families from across the country had been planning to claim...
Continue ReadingIf it's Easter, it must mean ... Christian fundamentalism!. (... That is, if you're the NYT Week In Review.) Sunday's Times section carried not one, but two articles on the evangelical movement. There was a political piece on the front page (Looking to Win in November, With a 2-Year Old...
Continue ReadingThis was roughly the image, drawn with a Sharpee, that suddenly appeared one December day on the side of a middle school lunch bag. The original point was simply to get the kids interested in the news, and civics. ...And, somewhere over the next 1,000 BAGs or so, it...
Continue ReadingImmediately following 9/11, there was actual fear that irony was dead. In the following weeks, a wisdom emerged that it would take years before a perspective of the event could be acquired -- especially through creative interpretation. Has the point finally arrived where "enough time has passed?" If Bruce Eric Kaplan's illustration can be...
Continue ReadingAt first, I thought it was just me. When I showed this picture around, however, everyone was concerned by it. Besides having plenty to say about the girl in the foreground, people were full of speculation about the scene overall. This image accompanied a brief "The Way We Live Now" piece...
Continue ReadingThis shot -- featuring U.S. general H.R. McMaster -- has a random, if underhanded, visual twist to it. As elaborated in last week's in-depth New Yorker article by George Packer on U.S. military strategy in Iraq, General McMaster employs an approach to counterinsurgency which pays significant respect to Iraqi...
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