Life in color

…magenta, cyan, yellow…

On December 29 it was Rohingya women, almost surely posed by the photographer Adam Ferguson, the lighting dramatic, the subjects seated in front of a pale purplish dropcloth, looking, four days after Christmas, like twin Virgin Marys even though they are Muslim refugees in Bangladesh.

Today it’s a hit man on the run in the Philippines, the sunbeam shining down behind him as though the photographer, Jes Aznar, waited all day for that moment of natural drama to make the murderer into a human being that you, the reader, might want to know more about.

I’m talking about the front page of The New York Times, photos printed on mere newsprint, not high-quality portrait paper.

The newspaper photos are like works of art, the colors both intense and soft.

I had a freelance photographer once who studied the path of the sun for most of a day before taking a picture of the brass plaque inlaid in the concrete on the top front step of the Michigan Union on State Street that tells of John Kennedy’s announcing the founding of the Peace Corps there. Of course my photographer got the light just right, just as Jes Aznar did.

What’s most amazing to me, the artistry of the photographers aside, is that after spending most of a newsroom career in black and white, I can every day view newspaper photos in color. It’s been going on for four decades now — color photos on newsprint — so I’m not sure why it still seems remarkable to me.

Older people in our culture get interpreted any number of ways, many of those ways not especially appealing, but if I end up in some commercial at 92, I’d like to be shown as awestruck. I realize that awestruck could come across as demented or confused, but being in a state of awe would be the fairest interpretation of how I feel quite frequently.

All it takes is the front page of a newspaper to remind me that once upon a time, in my very own lifetime, there was no digital anything, there was no computer-anything, there was no magenta, no cyan, no yellow in a newspaper, none of their mixed shades. Just black.

When the days and weeks and months ahead seem dark, I will remind myself that perhaps magenta, cyan and yellow, and all their varied combinations, will somehow make things better.