Response to 'The Boston Photographs'

Paragraph #1.

Summary: The paragraph consists entirely of a quote from photographer Stanley Forman of the Boston Herald American, about using a burning building as an opportunity for taking photos. She knew the situation was dangerous, but continued to do so until she turned around at the fear of seeing a girl get hurt.

Role: The paragraph opens the piece with an intense situation to set the tone of the kind of work Ephron did. This is possibly meant to be a standing point upon which to base our expectations of her other works.

Paragraph #2.

Summary: Describes the motions of the photographs with additional detail about the woman (Diana Bryant who died in the fall at age 19) and the fireman (noted to have a strong jaw). The pictures are described as a before, during, and after sequence, telling us the eventual outcome of their efforts to survive result with the woman dying and the child landing on top of her and surviving.

Role: The paragraph provides background context for the photos, instead of leaving us to guess at the details of the situation.

Paragraph #3.

Summary: Stanley Forman is given a brief background description, including his employment at the Boston Herald American. The paragraph then segways into the specific camera that he used, and how it was a revolutionary product for newspaper companies, since it could take three photographs per second. Next, the popularity of the photos is recognized in pointing out that over four hundred American newspapers carried the photos and published them.

Role: In this paragraph, Nora Ephron hints to the significance of new camera technology at the time, and how available and spread throughout the country they were. Not only were the photos valuable for their content, but because of the kind of camera they were taken with.

Paragraph #4.

Summary: Ephron refers to the photographs on both positive and negative notes. While it is incredible that these photos were taken in such a way, capturing the difference between life and death in just three frames, it is unfortunate and saddening that the events caught in the photos occurred at all.

Role: The photos are referred to as "...old-fashioned but perfect examples of photojournalism at its most spectacular." This is to imply the historical significance of the photos being taken of these three particular images, and with technology that was considered highly advanced for its time. Ephron also uses the photographs' content to define qualities of photos taken for photojournalism: "...they're technically superb and thoroughly modern..."

Paragraph #5.

Summary: When the photographs were released, there was an uproar of reaction from opposing sides. Some people thought the photos were offensive to the viewer as well as the people in the photo, while some thought of it as a new way of experiencing what others had experienced.

Role: Ephron points out how people can react so differently to the same thing, as well as the hypocrisy of others, like Marshall L. Stone, who published The Boston Photographs, but would not publish the assassination photo of the Vietcong prisoner.

Paragraph #6.

Summary: The Washington Post hires people (ombudsmen) to determine what the public will and will not react well to. Charles Seib, their ombudsman for the previous eight months, had never seen such a reaction before the release of The Boston Photographs.

Role: Even people whose job it is to relate to the public cannot determine what individual people will react to and how.

Paragraph #7.

Summary: The Washington Post wanted to use the photos for something other than what they were. Instead of focusing on the tragedy at hand, they wanted to create another story about questioning the safety of fire exits just to continue the tangent, instead of focusing on the fact that the photos convey a horrible tragedy that affected peoples' lives.

Role: The person being quoted (I assume to be Charles Seib) is pointing out that this is the kind of business of working in a newspaper. It's not about the truth or what to do about it. It's about making the story sell.

Paragraph #8.

Summary: The significance of the final photograph is pointed out. Would it have been published if it were taken a fraction of a second later and Diana Bryant was just a dead body? Or does watching the last moment of somebody's life captured forever on film have the same impact as seeing their corpse?

Role: Ephron questions the morality of newspaper publishing. While nudity is inappropriate, the moment before death was not. In the newspaper business, showing a breast is more offensive than seeing the pain and suffering of another human.

Paragraph #9.

Summary: Charles Seib asks any editors or publishers to question their morals, and whether or not they should publish something because the reader needs to see it, or because it is what they are most likely to buy because of their own morbid curiosity.

Role: Ephron holds this against publishing companies, saying that they cannot just focus on selling papers. They must also write about good stories that people will not find themselves too disturbed by.

Paragraph #10.

Summary: People would have reacted differently depending on the outcome of the sequence in the photos. If the mother had lived or the child had died, the response would have been very different.

Role: The content of the pictures would not change much, whatever the outcome. It still portrays a tragedy that people will react to either thinking on a positive note that they survived, or on a negative note that the mother died.

Paragraph #11.

Summary: Seib's view raises the concern of over-censorship, through which people will never hear of bad things happening, even though they are.

Role: Ephron reflects upon the importance of not censoring the news, since you cannot and should not censor reality. To do this would be to shield the public eye from any bad things that could happen.

Paragraph #12.

Summary: Ephron continues to argue that censorship is a bad idea, because it is irresponsible to pretend that bad things do not happen to people. To show the uncensored truth is to keep the public mentality strong by not shielding it from the truth.

Role: The significance of showing horrible images, such as from war, in the press has been that it stirs up public interest and opinion. When thousands of photos returned from Vietnam, the American opinion shifted overtime to be fully against the war. This is the result of letting the public decide for itself.

Paragraph #13.

Summary: The importance of the photos is not the context, it is that the photos were taken to begin with. They had impact on the world that simply does not come the same way with written journalism, because very little is left to the imagination.

Role: As a closing statement, Ephron backs up the opinion that to show horrible things in the media and to not sugarcoat reality is the way we should always experience the news. We do not get to pick event that happen in real life, so we should not get to pick, let alone have editors and publishers pick, which ones we read about and see depicted in graphic images such as The Boston Photographs.