Karen Miller Pensiero is the editor for newsroom standards at The Wall Street Journal. She’s also a Verona resident, in part (I like to think) because of the stories about town that she heard from me when we worked together at the Journal’s European edition 30 years ago.
There were no photos in the Journal back then, only its iconic dotted portraits. But the paper makes great used of photos now, in print and online and Pensiero reflected, in Friday’s edition, on how certain photos have changed the course of history. She begins with the recent photos of Aylan Kurdi, the 3-year-old Syrian refugee who drowned, with his mother and brother, while trying to escape from Turkey to Greece. But she considers many others, from photos of the poor in America’s cities and farms, to the photographic documentation of the Holocaust and the Civil Rights movement.
“Though the issues have varied greatly over the decades,” Pensiero wrote, “historians point to other eras when photographs have resonated in the same transformative way, creating new social awareness and spurring changes in policy.”
You can read the story and see the photos in the Journal here.
