The Daily Item in Sunbury, PA published this photo on Page One this week. Editor Len Ingrassia said it "wasn't too graphic" because it didn't have any "blood or guts". He then called it "the most compelling photo... to run anything else would not seem to be serving the reader." Really? Two cows escaped from a trailer and police shot them dead (the owner gave them permission because the cows were on their way to be auctioned for slaughter). Sounds less like a big story and more like suicide by cop - and the poor cows weren't on a major highway or anything; they were just wading around in a creek. So the need to run a story with this horrible photo seems sleazy.
Anyway, in a weird life-imitating-art moment, Am/Mex realized the above picture had a familiar feeling about it. And that's because it reminded us of this photograph:
This picture was made by Amy Stein as part of her Domesticated series. And that's her husband John in the lumberjack coat faking aim. Unlike the image above, no animal was threatened in the staging of this photo, despite their uneasy similarities. It's a fantastic photo on many levels, obviously eerily prescient.
Without context, these images could easily be mistaken as having the same dreadful conclusion, both capturing the moment just before an animal's imminent death. Amy Stein's image, conceived of and produced long before this week's top story in Sunbury, PA, is only more powerful in this new context, an imagined narrative unknowingly anticipating a future, actual event.
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