PressEthic

On September 11, 2001, photographer Thomas Hoepker took a picture. The taking of the picture wasn't anything unusual - that was his job, after all. It was the nature and content of this particular photograph that caused him to deem it "shocking," opting not to publish it for four years. The picture captured five people talking by the water in Brooklyn while, in the background, Lower Manhattan was engulfed in smoke.

This photograph was recently published in David Friend's book Watching the World Change: The Stories Behind the Images of 9/11. The photo, and Hoepker's response to its subjects, was used by Frank Rich to introduce a September 10, 2006 New York Times column, titled "Whatever Happened to the America of 9/12?" (Times Select subscription required to view article.)

Mr. Hoepker found his subjects troubling. “They were totally relaxed like any normal afternoon,” he told Mr. Friend. “It’s possible they lost people and cared, but they were not stirred by it.” ...

What he caught was this: Traumatic as the attack on America was, 9/11 would recede quickly for many. This is a country that likes to move on, and fast. The young people in Mr. Hoepker’s photo aren’t necessarily callous. They’re just American.

In the five years since the attacks, the ability of Americans to dust themselves off and keep going explains both what's gone right and what's gone wrong on our path to the divided and dispirited state the nation finds itself in today."

Rich then uses this line of reasoning to make his ultimate point that Americans "have moved on, but no one can argue that we have moved ahead."

Shortly after, Slate.com published a piece that questioned both Hoepker and Rich's interpretation of the photo, providing another, alternate, version of the events that could have transpired between the people in the picture.

At the end of the article, the author, David Plotz, asks the subjects of the picture to come forward and respond to the debate, a call that was answered by one of the men in the photograph. In an email to Slate, he writes,

We were in a profound state of shock and disbelief, like everyone else we encountered that day. Thomas Hoepker did not ask permission to photograph us nor did he make any attempt to ascertain our state of mind ...

Had Hoepker walked fifty feet over to introduce himself he would have discovered a bunch of New Yorkers in the middle of an animated discussion about what had just happened. He instead chose to publish the photograph that allowed him to draw the conclusions he wished to draw.

While Rich's ultimate conclusions about Americans' responses to 9/11 weren't necessarily untrue, they were predicated on a fundamental inaccuracy that was lazy and careless for him to begin his column with.

Walter Sipser, the man who responded to Slate's article ends his email by responding to Rich's bottom line.

A more honest conclusion might start by acknowledging just how easily a photograph can be manipulated, especially in the advancement of one's own biases or in the service of one's own career.

As journalists, it is far too easy to make generalizations based on one person's experience or perception, using a single image or quote as the basis for an entire argument. It is certainly tempting to ignore context when it is inconvenient to our end goal, but it is far more responsible to take the entire situation into account, even if it makes the point a little less neat and tidy.