Convicted sniper John Allen Muhammad looks around the courtroom at the beginning of his trial in Virginia Beach, Va., in this Oct. 14, 2003 file photo. (Lawrence Jackson/AP photo)

 November 2003

During his trial, the Washington Post and the Washington Times recently ran a large above-the-fold, front-page color photograph of accused 2002 Washington area sniper, John Allen Muhammad.  This photo sends mixed messages.  If a newspaper's mission is to provide the who, what where, when, and why of a news story, this particular photography blurred that mission.

The photo ran extra large, larger than most photos of individuals.  As a portrait photographer, I would certainly say it showed some of the mystery of the man, capturing a cunning of the eyes, that one can imagine he used to beguile a young impressionable companion.  But the golden background and the stillness of the subject, another antithesis of most newspaper photographs, cast a more portrait studio/hagiography quality to this image.  And therein lies confusion.

Photographs have a language.  The most basic feature, black and white vs. color, can be regarded as the particular language, i.e. Spanish or English.  The grammar is how the photographer uses the equipment.  Sports photographers usually use long telephoto lens, which compress action, making it almost more engaging than if you were at a game.  That's why a shot of a baseball pitcher aimed at the batter seems much closer than if we were stood right next to the pitcher.  Many news photographers use wide-angle lens to capture as much of the action as possible.  Portrait photographers usually use a 100mm lens because it least distorts the contours of the human face.  The nuance of photo language is more subtle, its slang, evolving meanings, humor, sarcasm, double-entendre, etc.

We expect high school senior portraits, real estate photographs, newspaper, studio portraits, art, advertising and Hollywood publicity photographs, medical and police photographs, etc., to all look a certain way, enabling us to see and process images quickly, for the average person is bombarded with hundreds of images a day, with a limited vocabulary to translate them.

My confusion with the Muhammad photograph is because it's a crossover of photographic styles.  The photograph of John Allen Muhammad on the front page that day was not a in a photo journalistic style but more a Hollywood publicity one.  

Muhammad could easily have been Denzel Washington in a publicity shot for Warner Brothers, so attractive, so warmly colored, so appealing the subject.  All qualities that are the opposite of the evidence we have about the man.

As a photographer I would have been overjoyed to capture such a stunning image in a courtroom, with everything out of my control but the camera.  The editor's job is more complex.  An editor can enhance or diminish a photograph.  Would the photo have been less objectionable if it had been on the jump page, smaller, competing with the Bloomingdales ads?

As a resident of Northern Virginia with two school aged children, I remember those three weeks in October with emotional investment.  I recall the tragic deaths and poignant biographies of so many lives cut brutally short.  I remember the road blocks, school lock-downs, fear of letting my children play outdoors, the non-stop news coverage, a trepidation to do normal things such as shopping, pumping gas, dropping our children off at school.  The police escort to my car when I visited my child's middle school.  Fear was everywhere.

The Post's glamorization of such an emotional subject was an odd thing to do.  It was a...post modern thing to do, which is the hallmark of our age, mixing things up.  Blurring things. Ever since Truman Capote's book, In Cold Blood, we have been looking at the psychopaths among us in a different light.  The Washington Post did that with Muhammad's photograph. What's the real message here?