Looks like it’s Michele McNally, deputy photo editor for the New York Times’ turn to pooh-pooh reader questions this week:
Q. As the Times has reported on one occasion, the Bush administration has been singularly aggressive in shaping and staging angles of photographs possible to take of the president and other members of the administration. Herding the press into an enclosure from which only dynamic upward-angled shots of the president are possible, for example. or setting the president against the background of the brightly lit cathedral in New Orleans results in shots worthy of Leni Riefenstahl. Wouldn’t it be proper to either refuse to publish such manipulated shots, or run a note in the caption explaining the limits imposed on taking it? Since the manipulation is otherwise invisible to the reader, doesn’t the Times have a duty to inform readers about the behind the scenes shaping of such shots?
— Ellen Gruber Garvey, Brooklyn, N.Y.
A. Our photographers desperately try to get around that problem…
But seriously…about New Orleans. We spoke about the “presidential stagecraft” in this story.
She also insists that it’s illegal to photograph subways or bridges.
Does calling BS on this total dodge of the real, larger, ongoing issue by disingenuously focusing on the particulars of a single incident screw my chances of ever writing for the Times again?