Censorship in Nora Ephron’s The Boston Photographs

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The Necessity of Truth: Censorship in Nora Ephron’s “The Boston Photographs”

Originally published in 1975, Nora Ephron’s essay “The Boston Photographs” is both still relevant and controversial almost forty years later. It deals with the series of three photographs that were published in newspapers across the country. The most important one shows a mother and child falling off a collapsed fire escape. Both have their limbs outstretched. If both had survived, maybe the reaction would have been different. The child survived by landing miraculously on the mother, but the mother ended up dying. The question on everyone’s mind was why the photographer, Stanley Forman, decided to take the photographs instead of trying to help the falling mother and child.
According to Ephron, “…the day the Boston photographs appeared, The Washington Post received over seventy calls in protest” (319). For that many people to pick up the phone and call, it shows that there was a justifiable reason for that to happen. The Post’s Charles Seib, the ombudsman at the time, while he was being interviewed, stated about the photographs: “They dramatically conveyed something that had happened, and that is the business we’re in. They were news…” (319). And the question remains, then: What should be or needs to be censored, if anything, from the public, especially when it deals with news? By the end, Nora Ephron agrees with their publication and the reasons for why they were printed instead of being censored for the public. I agree with her and believe that we must find out about tragedy if it happens, and it does in the world. Though it is unnecessary to have every news story be something tragic, those that are tragic also have their place in the news, and ar...

... middle of paper ...

...otograph by Carter. Like the reference to Vietnam, Carter took this photo—and many others—as a photojournalist documenting much of what was happening around war and Apartheid. He did his job well and did indeed take some “breathtaking pictures” of many things, and though many of them would “disturb readers,” in the words of Ephron, the work remains necessary and powerful. We need these photos in our lives to show us the truth, reveal the news as accurately as possible, and to show us a harrowing though artistic side to both beauty and tragedy and the world.

Works Cited

Ephron, Norah. “The Boston Photographs.” Crazy Salad and Scribble Scribble: Some Things About Women and Notes on Media. New York: Vintage, 2012. Print.

Carter, Kevin. Untitled. March 1993. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kevin-Carter-Child-Vulture-Sudan.jpg. Photograph. Online. 20 Feb. 2014.

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