viz.

Jezebel picked up on a story in the Washington Post and the The Daily Telegraph about the surprising shared cameraman (Nick Ut) behind the following well-known photographs:

If you hadn’t heard, two Penn State students dressed up for Halloween as victims of the Virginia Tech campus shooting. These pictures popped up on facebook, and last weekthe mainstream media caught the story. This week, Northern Illinois University rescheduled the first day of final examinations after a threat was found scrawled in a dorm bathroom. These two events are linked, not merely because the NIU threat made reference to the Virginia Tech shooting, but because both events, and the Virginia Tech tragedy along with them, are funded by individuals’ odd attachment to a kind of transgressive iconic visual performance.

After running out of passive aggressive notes to look at when taking breaks from my work, I began branching out to the various blogs mentioned on the website. My newest favorite is Suicide Food. What is suicide food, one might ask?

Adam Huggins, a free-lance photograph for the New York Times recently made a visual argument that caused a lot of people to pay attention to manholes.

Although Cannon probably sells a lot of photography equipment to journalists, according to a www.news.com article, they made some of these loyal customers very angry when the NFL made it mandatory for photojournalists to wear a red vest with the Cannon logo on it for "security" reasons.

Wonkette runs a weekly feature in their "Joke and Dagger Department" in which they get the "Comics Curmudgeon" to look at the week's political cartoons. This week focuses on the (wo)man-beasts slouching towards the White House:

The Guardian is reporting that a study by Charlie Frowd, Vicki Bruce, David Ross, Alex McIntyre, and Peter J. B. Hancock at the University of Central Lancashire published in Visual Cognition found that subjects were able to identify a caricature of a person’s face 40% of the time, but could only identify the same face in a police sketch 20% of the time.

via Boing Boing

Slate has posted a slideshow on the history of the illustration of American children’s books. The slides are based on Timothy G. Young’s book, Drawn To Enchant, which explains how images for children went from orderly scenes of proper behavior, like this one by Justin H. Howard for Doings of the Alphabet (excluding, of course, the bratty mischief-makers in the background):

to the madcap drawings of Maurice Sendak:

The Human Rights Campaign's Daily Newsletter recently spotlighted an article in The New York Times about Michelle Bruce, a 46 year old politician in Riverdale, GA.

Interesting arrangement/focus in the leading photo on the front page of The New York Times:

(Doug Mills/The New York Times)
Gore finds himself in front here (a little too close) and President Bush smiles, leering over his shoulder. The entire composition feels uncomfortable and, if this weren't the feeling they were going for, I'm sure the awkward photo would have ended up on the (virtual) cutting room floor.

Maybe I'm just feeling seasonal, but it seems they've chosen one of these men as the Grinch:

Wonkette offers a different shot in which GWB is somewhat less creepy.