It is difficult to get the news

selected images

About this project . . .

It is difficult to get the news

One day, I saw a woman’s face staring up at me from a newspaper on the sidewalk. She looked beautiful and haunted, strangely perfect despite the paper being torn and scuffed. I picked up the paper, partly to save her from being walked on even more. At home, I photographed the photograph, and this project began. The images in this series are of photographs of everyday people who happened to have had their pictures in a newspaper. They suggest the range of reasons that anonymous folks momentarily catch the public eye. The newspapers themselves were drawn from three sources—papers I found on the sidewalks, papers that had been set aside for recycling, and papers at the American Newspaper Repository. These sources reflect the fates to which old news is usually consigned. In part to call attention to our tendency to dismiss what we find in yesterday’s newspapers as no longer of import, I’ve printed these images quite large.