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But readers tend to filter the image through their own assumptions
Sunday, July 15, 2001
If you do not recall seeing the picture I include with my column today, which appeared first on the front page of the July 6 Post-Gazette, take a good look at it before you read anything I have to say, as well as the criticisms from readers that abound in the letters in today's Forum section.
As you look at it, do so self-consciously. Examine your reactions and make conscious note of them, because my guess is that you will be surprised on several counts once you hear what I am going to tell you, even have second thoughts. The truth has a way of doing that.
Annie O'Neill, an outstanding photographer who came to the PG from Detroit in May 1995, was in the Strip District at the Pittsburgh Ballet Theater's Liberty Avenue school. The assignment had not panned out. But on her way back to her car, she saw five youngsters playing in a shopping cart on the sidewalk.
"The first thing that came to mind," she said, "was a fond memory from about 25 years ago when my twin and two of my brothers and I were racing each other in shopping carts in my parents' deli in New York. I wondered if I could capture that same feeling in what I saw happening.
"The other thought I had was of Teenie Harris, a photographer whose work I just had seen exhibited in a museum. His photographs are of ordinary life in Pittsburgh and are an inspiration. The part of this job I love is to capture everyday life in a manner that connects to people.
"I saw these kids being ingenious, vibrant and daring. I feel the photo has all that in it. The kids had gone off the sidewalk already successfully and they got a thrill from it. The brothers were encouraging the sister to 'go off the curb' again when I took the photo of them spilling out. I immediately put my cameras down to make sure they were OK. The next frames on the film are of the boys picking up my cameras and shooting photos of me."
It is notable that the issue of O'Neill being a newspaper photographer came up and that she went to children's nearby house not once but twice, both to get identifications and to share several of her pictures with the children's mother, who she said was pleased to have them.
At the newspaper that evening, there was a debate about which of O'Neill's photos to run. The final choice came down to two images, an earlier shot of the four boys in the cart urging their little sister to push harder as one of them stood and pointed with his arm in the direction in which they wished to travel, and the picture here. It was a close call because both were excellent from a pictorial point of view, if for different reasons.
I think it is instructive that there was a difference of opinion about which picture to use. Some editors felt the image above was too violent and O'Neill's sense of fun and intrepidness might get lost. Others argued, "Come on! What a great shot! It's real life! Run it on the front page."
From my point of view, those are the important facts: Nothing was posed. Nobody's privacy was violated. No one was abandoned in harm's way. Nothing was unrepresentative of everyday Pittsburgh life.
So what is all the fuss about? I can think of several issues, only one of which strikes me as significant. Yes, there is the matter of what a stolen cart was doing there in the first place (give me a break, please) and, yes, it takes an entire village to raise a child (but O'Neill's description about benign unsupervised play goes to that point).
My significant issue is one that comes up again and again with news photography: Is the photograph representative or is it exploitative? Neither adjective is perfectly apt, but they provide as precise a description as I can come up with of the dichotomy. It goes like this:
Bill Clinton is giving the State of the Union Address. There are hundreds of different photographs from which to choose. Do you pick the one that makes him look the most handsome, the most foolish, the one when he was just beginning his speech or the one when he was winding down? Or do you pick a photo for some other reason?
The quick answer is that you select the one (or ones) that best capture key moments. But even then, there are choices and debates about this image being the best and that expression or perspective being unnecessarily unflattering. This agonizing occurs hundreds and hundreds of times in a month of news coverage. Take my word for it.
In this particular case, I think the needle is a bit on the exploitative side of the dial, but barely. The image is a wonderful one, for all the reasons outlined. But, as the mail and this column also illustrate, the photograph requires a certain amount of explaining, perhaps too much.
For that reason I think I'd give the nod to O'Neill's other shot of the brothers urging their sister to push harder and bounce them off the curb one more time. It would not quiet all the critics, particularly those who want to make an issue about unsupervised play or offer thinly disguised commentary about black urban life. But it would have been much less likely to have been misunderstood.
(Annie O'Neill, Post-Gazette) 
John G. Craig Jr. is editor of the Post-Gazette (jcraig@post-gazette.com).