September 15, 2006
That’s Rich Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 09:35 AM EST On September 10, Frank Rich wrote a column in The New York Times about a photograph he said was “shocking” and “taboo.” “It shows five young friends on the waterfront in Brooklyn,” he wrote, “taking what seems to be a lunch or bike-riding break, enjoying the radiant late-summer sun and chatting away as cascades of smoke engulf Lower Manhattan in the background.”
The photograph was not published with Rich’s column, and if that was all you read, you might have expected to see people laughing uproariously and pouring champagne. In fact, as you can see here in Slate, the picture does show a group of people on the Brooklyn waterfront with the World Trade Center burning in the background, but there is nothing lighthearted or insouciant about it—certainly nothing surprising. Rich knows a grand total of zero about the people in the picture, so he builds a fantasy around them and then bases a column on that fantasy (or half a column, I should say, since the second half is just his usual auto-rant).
Rich’s remarks were based on the assumption that the people in the photograph were somehow ignoring or shrugging off the disaster across the water. But as is pointed out here the photograph shows nothing of the kind; it’s all supposition on Rich’s part. In fact, a couple of the people in the picture have gotten in touch with Slate to say that they “were in a profound state of shock and disbelief, like everyone else we encountered that day,” and were “in the middle of an animated discussion about what had just happened.” Far from being friends, two of them had never met the other three before. (For the photographer’s inconclusive account of the picture and its aftermath, see this).
Yet even if the people in the picture had been reading magazines or talking about tennis, it wouldn’t have meant they were insensible to the importance of the event in front of them. Rich is mistaken in his interpretation of the photo, but much more so in his assumption that it’s “shocking” to hear that people went about their business on September 11 instead of gnashing their teeth and rending their garments. Just about everyone who was in the New York area at the time can recall instances of this. On my walk home through Manhattan on that warm evening, I saw people shopping, eating in sidewalk cafés, playing games in the park, and doing dozens of other routine activities. Why am I supposed to be shocked? Here, as usual, Rich makes the mistake of assuming that his readers are as naive as he is.
There’s a lesson to be learned from this, besides the obvious one that Frank Rich is as sharp as a pair of nursery-school scissors. Photographs can be an enormous help in the study of history; that’s the idea on which American Heritage was founded. But they can also be deceptive, especially when you approach them with preconceptions.
When our staff was compiling our December 1999 issue, which contained a picture for every year from 1900 to 1999, the photograph we chose for 1952 showed a crowd in Platteville, Wisconsin, listening to a speech by Sen. Joseph McCarthy. I can’t find a copy of the picture online, but I do recall that when we were considering that photo for inclusion, half of our editors thought it conveyed everything about McCarthy and his supporters and the spirit of the times in a single image—the perfect historical photo. And the other half of us thought it looked like any other crowd of white people in the 1950s looking at something.
Then there’s Edward Steichen’s famous photograph of J. P. Morgan. It seems to sum up everything we know about the man: bold, ruthless, determined, impulsive, with an insatiable thirst for domination. In fact, as our fellow blogger John Steele Gordon explained in our pages in 1989 (scroll down to near the end), the reason for Morgan’s angry expression is that Steichen had asked him to pose in an uncomfortable position. Moreover, writes Gordon:
“Over the eighty-six years since the portrait was taken, many people have wondered how Steichen got Morgan to pose for him with a dagger in his hand, given all the weighty overtones of cut-throat capitalism that conveyed. In fact, the ‘dagger’ is only the reflection of light off the arm of the chair Morgan was sitting in.
“As Steichen explained, ‘It is not only photographers who read meanings into their photographs.’”
Indeed it is not. We all project our preconceptions into pictures and find things that aren’t there; that’s a natural human tendency. We all look at pictures and make up stories about them. And there’s nothing wrong with that—just as long as you don’t base an entire newspaper column on your mistaken analysis.
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