Photo Personifies GRIEF
 Figure 1. |  Figure 2. |
Figures 1 and 2: Slate Magazine ran a collage of front pages from different newspapers featuring an identical photograph, under the headline, “The Intern Who Took the Defining Photograph of the Dallas Shooting”. Out of the thousands of images coming from this tragic news event, what made this photo of a grief-stricken police officer comforting a colleague "the Defining Photograph?” Is Slate even right?
If history is any guide, Slate most likely is correct. If we think back to other traumatic news events, photographs in which people are seen reacting with extreme emotion tend to be the pictures which get reproduced the most, and remembered the longest. Can you bring to mind the napalm-covered children screaming as they run down a road in Vietnam (Figure 3), or the horrified young woman kneeling beside the body of a Kent State student who has just been shot to death (Figure 4)? These two photos alone are among the most reproduced of the entire 20th century.
 Figure 3. |  Figure 4. |
This more recent image from the ER entrance of Baylor University Hospital in Dallas, documenting an equally traumatic event, is also likely to become iconic. Why? One thing that’s instructive is to look at some of the other "players" in all three historic photos. Their faces are nondescript, inconclusive, even deadpan. And that’s typical. Even in extreme, dramatic situations, it’s rare that our face reveals our strongest, most primal, emotions through full-on anger, sadness, horror, or disgust. Most of the time, our face is active in ways that are more random than revealing.
When our inner feelings do hit a certain, energetic peak, our face is uncontrollably configured in a way which communicates a clear, un-modulated emotional truth. This particular photograph of the policeman’s grief (Figure 5) is real and rare; it draws out our own emotions and our empathy. This is what makes such an image so important, memorable, and irreplaceable.
When our inner feelings do hit a certain, energetic peak, our face is uncontrollably configured in a way which communicates a clear, un-modulated emotional truth. This particular photograph of the policeman’s grief (Figure 5) is real and rare; it draws out our own emotions and our empathy. This is what makes such an image so important, memorable, and irreplaceable.
 Figure 5. | And, it’s the empathy that’s the key here; the policeman's face evokes our own sadness about what’s happened to people we will never meet in a place we may have never been, but to which we nonetheless feel connected. His face is contorted into the classic grief pattern - eyebrows twisted up in distress, eyes compressed from below, mouth stretched sideways, lips pursed. That’s why we have facial expressions – so we can share our deepest feelings - as the police officer in this picture is doing. According to the photographer, he heard sobbing, turned and shot this photo; but it’s not the policeman who was crying; it’s the woman whose face we don't see whom he is comforting. The officer's face is in grief because of his empathy for her which, in turn, inspires our empathy. This is the power of the face. |
Credits: (top left) Newspaper front pages from El Paso Times, The Dallas Morning News, and The Oklahoman. Graphic by Slate Magazine. (top right) Photo taken after the Dallas police shootings on July 7, 2016 by Ting Shen, intern at The Dallas Morning News, a recent photo journalism graduate from Columbia College in Chicago. (middle left photo) Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph taken during the Vietnam War on June 8, 1972 by AP photographer, Nick Ut. (middle right photo) Pulitzer-Prize-winning photograph by photojournalism student, John Filo, in the aftermath of the Kent State shootings on May 4, 1970. Go here to read the referenced Slate Magazine article, written by Slate intern, Laura Wagner.
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