Historic Microstock
Dateline: Los Angeles
Sometimes as a photographer you are in the right place at the right time. You get a sense of history about a subject, something you know is news before you even snap the capture button. The quality of conveying a sense of history in a medium is its historicity, and many news and feature images have this quality. The photography impulse can be good one.
The above image is a picture of the LA Weekly, heretofore a “dirty rag”, a newsprint weekly that has developed and swelled until sometimes its word was law. The L. A. City Council coverage gets in under the cracks. Movie and stage and music is edgy. The industry coverage includes Nikki Finke’s Deadline Hollywood Daily, a must read for people who want to get a real handle on the underbelly of the entertainment industry heaves.
The L. A. Weekly has served an underground weekly to the official newspaper of record in the Los Angeles firmament. Sure we have a big metropolitan newspaper around here somewhere. But nobody much believes what’s in it. The L. A. Weekly is likely to name names. Talk about stuff people only whisper about.
In fact the L.A. Weeklyis practically its own genre. The interviews and news is what Angelenos care about. Skateboard art, tattoo titans, South gate strip club lawsuits, yet another Westminster pho restaurant, extensive cinematic reviews, encores, events, and features. The variety and constancy is rewarding when the slop of the L. A. Times washes ashore every morning.
The Los Angeles Times however has been dumbed down to a trickle by the behemoth Tribune Corporation, and Los Angeles readers with nothing to read started to to assume the position whenever Thursday’s plop on the pavement meant the New Weekly was out. The rag always had the papery feel of a ‘trying to get there” publication.
Until now.
observe the image. What we have here is a perfect bound edition of the latest L. A. Weekly. You may be able to see from the picture that the edge has a spine, and the cover has some gloss to it. This is officially a magazine. This is news. And that news is news, makes it a picture. An occasion like this does not come about every day.
While the saying can be trite in this instance it is never more true than ever before; a picture is worth a thousand words.
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