Another Portrait of Imminent Death, but One Worthy of Publishing

N.Y.P.D.This security-camera still taken moments before the murder of Brandon Woodard, who is looking at his smartphone.

Last week, there was a Web's worth of debate about the decision of The New York Post to publish a salaciously headlined photo of a man just before he was struck and killed by a subway train in New York.

On Wednesday, many newspapers that cover New York, including The New York Times, published another photo of another man who was about to die.

In this instance, Brandon Lincoln Woodard, visiting from Los Angeles, was shown strolling down West 58th Street in New York, unaware that just over his shoulder, a man with a nickel-plated gun was about to shoot him dead. The image, lifted from a surveillance video, was cinematic and chilling, a still from a murder mystery movie that was all too real.

It is less a portrait of mayhem than a deconstruction of assassination. It is a deeply compelling image, not because of any gore - there is none - but because it shows a man whose f ate has arrived without his knowledge. In that sense, it is the opposite of the subway photo in which the victim, Ki-Suck Han, is staring at an on-rushing train bearing down on him.

As Jack Shafer has pointed out, there is an entire popular genre of “about to die” photos, in part because unlike battlefield images, they suggest we are all targets in one way or another. Barbie Zelizer, a media scholar, told Mr. Shafer that images of impending death tend to provide curiosity rather than repelling the viewer. “They often draw viewers in, fostering engagement, creating empathy and subjective involvement, inviting debate,” she said.

As with the subway photo in The New York Post, the photo published on Wednesday will provoke lot s of discussion, but not for the same reasons. It is ghoulish in aspects, but there is a persistent and immediate public interest in publishing the photo, as Michele McNally, the assistant managing editor at The Times who oversees photography, explained to me.

The decision to publish the photo “was not a close call,” she said. “There is a crime being committed, there is information that could help locate the suspect, and there is other information in the photograph that when it is put out there, could be helpful in solving the crime. It was a no-brainer.” (By contrast, she said, the Post photo left her “ambivalent” and she “would have consulted with many,” adding, “I think a lot of criticism of the picture comes from the way it was displayed in the Post, the headline and caption and the ethics of lifting a camera at that moment in time.)

And Mr. Woodard's death is, unfortunately, far less anomalous than someone being thrown in front of a sub way train. In a typical year, more than 10,000 people in America die at the wrong end of gun. How ubiquitous is gun crime? When I made a brief inquiry of Ms. McNally by e-mail about the “photo of the shooter,” she immediately replied, “Which one?”