new york times

has anyone seen the current new york times add campaign? a heavy, smoke laden sky, strong green hues, two perfectly framed soldiers. most of these advertisements are at bus stops, lit from behind in giant light boxes. this seems to me to be a troubling idea about how to sell newspapers. at first glance the advertisements might be confused for a lingering poster for the jeff wall show at the moma, or a sofia coppola film about iraq. for those of you who don't live in new york city, the same thing is going on on the front page of the times. i gathered the above images from 10min of searching through recent front pages on the new york times website. while all of these are documentary photographs, for me their referent is part of a different symbolic economy. their uncanny similarity to recent large-scale photography and film probably has more to do with our reception of images...but letterbox format doesn't help.

[all from the front page of The New York Times. 2007]