Signaling Strangelove: The New Yorker Cover’s Brilliant Take on SignalGate

Barry Blitt’s masterpiece perfectly captures the essence of the Trump administration. It’s a visual terror warning worthy of Kubrick himself. By Michael Shaw Barry Blitt’s latest New Yorker cover masterfully captures the essence of the SignalGate scandal. The illustration, depicting administration officials gleefully riding a missile downward like deranged...

The State of Disunion

I’m breaking down key images from Trump’s 2025 State of the Union—moments capturing a chamber in splinters, where resistance took many forms and silence would have meant complicity. By Michael Shaw “You have no mandate! You have no mandate to cut Medicare!” Pundits blamed Democrats for losing their cool. But incitement...

Trump’s Village People Takeover – Why This Matters Now

Is Trump’s MAGA theater still hypnotizing America—or is it finally awakening the resistance? By Michael Shaw One plays a cowboy, one plays a construction worker, and another plays a president. What’s genuinely unsettling isn’t the spectacle itself—it’s how quickly we’ve normalized it. Trump dancing with the Village People at...

The Visual Politics of the LA Fires

From a man rescuing Old Glory to a haunting ‘stairway to nowhere,’ key photos from LA’s devastating fires expose America’s most profound social divisions inflamed by Trump’s sabotage. By Michael Shaw In our latest short Chatting the Pictures video, Cara and I analyze a defining image from the LA fires: a...

Scenes from the Coronation of King Donald II: A Visual Guide to American Autocracy

From executive order theater to Elon’s salute, telling moments of Trump’s second inauguration (and yes, Justice Jackson’s eloquent necklace). By Michael Shaw “Don’t let the rotor blade hit you on the way out.” We know the whole ‘waving goodbye to your predecessor’ thing is tradition. But that photo of...

A Visually Rhythmic Journey Through a Year’s Most Striking Book Covers

A curated tour of 2024’s most striking book covers reveals unexpected patterns in our collective consciousness – from wild abandonment to geometric precision, from fragmentation to wholeness. By Michael Shaw In 2024, book cover design mirrored our cultural moment, reflecting our anxieties and aspirations through visual allusion. Drawing from PRINT...

What’s in a “Top 100 Photos of the Year” List?

TIME’s Top 100 Photos of 2024 captures the year’s defining crises, from war and climate disasters to political polarization. This analysis explores what the images reveal—and what they leave out. By Michael Shaw Every year-end, media organizations and news photo publishers ritually curate their choice of best images. Both...

The Great Shattering: Scenes from America’s Political and Psychic Electoral Rupture

November 5th, 2024, sent shockwaves across the nation. From Howard University to Palm Beach, election night photos captured a seismic shift that will profoundly reshape America. By Michael Shaw In an election night defined by dashed expectations and visual ironies, the 2024 presidential race revealed itself through a series...

Harris vs. Trump: On Gender, Power, and the Future of America

Through key visuals, we explore the deep divisions laid bare by the 2024 campaign—especially along gender lines—and the great uncertainty that lies ahead. By Michael Shaw The presidential election has exposed all kinds of fault lines, but one fracture has come to define Kamala Harris’s historic run. In the...

The 13 Most Telling Photographs of the Harris-Trump Presidential Debate

Harris outmaneuvered Trump using psychological tactics to expose his weaknesses potentially reshaping the 2024 election narrative.

The Picture Perfect Democratic Convention – Part 2

In part two of my visual round-up of the 2024 DNC, I look at the wooing of the middle class, the visibility of the Uncommitted delegates, the rush of the Content Creators, and the tweaking of Trump. By Michael Shaw While Part 1 focused on the Democratic National Convention’s...

The Picture Perfect Democratic Convention – Part 1

In Part 1 of my DNC roundup, I explore the pivot from Biden, Dems laying claim to the flag, women’s empowerment in Harris’s rise, and family, inclusion, and generational change. By Michael Shaw How dynamic was the Democratic Convention? Well, the Dems have an election to win, and the...

Chatting the Pictures: The Magnetic Harris and Walz Dynamic in One Frame

Chatting the Pictures: The Trump Crazy, and that Viral Olympic Surfing Pic

In a pair of videos, we read a brilliant Mark Peterson image exposing the ever-more-damaged Donald Trump and riff on an almost supernatural photo from the Paris (and Tahiti) Olympics. By Michael Shaw No wonder Trump can’t get over Biden dropping out. While the former president’s mental health was...

Besides RNC Fever Dream, a Perfect Photo of “the New Weirdness”

A single word threatens to expose the Trump/MAGA madness. Sinna Nasseri’s twilight-zone picture embodies the moment. By Michael Shaw In the landscape of American politics, a new narrative is taking root, transforming the perception of Donald Trump and J.D. Vance from looming threats to democracy into something far more...

Crafting Trump’s Hero Narrative: Media’s Visual Complicity in the Assassination Drama—and the Shoe Panic Explained

Now that Trump has spun the attack images into convention hype and marketing gold, we dissect the media’s role, address the problem with the bullet photo, and unravel his mysterious shoe anxiety. By Michael Shaw On July 15, 2024, former President Donald Trump was the target of an assassination...

“Climate Ecstasy” and More: Our Photography Round-Up

It’s true—people value the pictures we choose just as much as what we have to say about them. By Michael Shaw   One problem with our 24/7 media culture is that news that didn’t happen today or yesterday is treated like stale bread. That’s a shame, especially when it...

The Most Cringeworthy Media Visuals After Biden’s Nightmare Debate

Nobody wants to revisit what happened on stage, so we focus on the media fallout and the visual framing of the first 2024 presidential debate.