The Stories Pictures Tell
The viewer sees at once the psychological gulf between Gertz and Newman on the right and Leopold on the left. Gertz is smiling at a story the jovial Newman seems to be telling him. These are two men of the world at ease, savoring a job well done. Leopold, his face half hidden beneath his fedora, stares into space, his isolation testimony to those decades behind bars. But what gives the picture its power is the hint that it was always so for Leopold, that as an adolescent he needed to think himself a superman because he couldn’t function as a normal social human being.
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If the book was a calculation does that spoil the picture or enhance it? “Sometimes the hokey pictures tell more about the time than the nonposed pictures,” says Cahan. “When you look at old magazines the ads say more than the copy.”
“I don’t think the Sun-Times really knew what they had in their archives,” says Williams. “The work was so strong and, interestingly, so much of the work we chose had never been published in the newspaper. There were two levels in the archives–the ones that made the paper and made news of the day, and the other kind that was never published and documented social history.”
Tribune, Explain Yourself
On the same page Maureen Dowd wrote, “W. doesn’t see division as a danger. He sees it as a wingman. The president got re-elected by dividing the country along fault lines of fear, intolerance, ignorance and religious rule.”
Any paper with 700,000 readers and slipping circulation wants to hang on to every single one. The Tribune owes readers who disagree with its editorial policy an explanation. It needs to tell us why an urban, secular, internationalist, intellectually curious paper such as itself remains in thrall to the Republican Party, so much so that among Tribune employees there’s no surer bet than that in four years the paper will endorse the Republican candidate for president–whichever man, woman, or farm animal that candidate turns out to be.
