Woohoo, Form strikes again!

[ by Charles Cameron — a wager on the impact of form in media ]

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It’s a moment in the unfurling of an event: the moment when our war correspondents, photographers, whoever, manage to bring style to their reporting, not simply fact.

Take a look at the symmetries here — the photographer wasn’t just able to get a shot, but to get what we might call a shot with form — an artist’s shot:

Atlantic boy Named Jihad image 602

  • Photo credit: Hosam Katan / Reuters
  • From The Atlantic, The Boy Named Jihad: From the Ashes of the Arab Spring to the Battlefields of Syria
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    Great artists, how can I say this, bring this quality with them. It’s in their eyes for vision, their ears for language. Gregory Johnsen is one of those..

    My wager would be that images and or texts infused with this quality go deeper, communicate more memorably, than texts or images that lack it. FWIW.