The Times is better here because we get more information from its cover: There are graphs on both pages, but rather than offering a small generic image of traders, the Times shows Barney Frank at a press conference. It is an image of controlled chaos, where the man in charge practically blends in with the people to whom he is speaking.

Interestingly, the WSJ did include a photo of that press conference, but put it on A3, next to a Tiffany ad.

Needless to say, a photo inside the paper embedded in advertising does not have the impact of a front-page shot. Now, this could be an editorial choice—to downplay Frank’s press conference—but the practical result is a stiff-looking front page.

Which brings us to another point. The WSJ often emphasizes graphs over photos or, as in the example below, uses photos as background for the graphic information:

Hey, we like graphs. But they don’t substitute for photographs. Real photographs. Not wallpaper for the numbers.

Now, all this said, even the cover of the Times doesn’t always greet us with impact. Like the October 7 cover, where, in a look more typical of the WSJ, we got its version of the stock-trader typology, accompanied by several graphs:

And this cover leads us to one last point: the problem of repetition.

It wasn’t just the composition here that caught our eye. It was the woman in the middle photo. We’d seen her someplace before… That’s right. As a distressed trader on the cover of the September 17 FT:

She also appears on the October 7 WSJ Money & Investing front, accompanying a teaser at the top left of the page:

This wasn’t the first time we had encountered such repetition. Remember that first FT photo>?

That one, from the AP, really made the rounds.

As local and regional papers picked it up, this rather unremarkable photo appeared across the press that day as the (hidden) face of the Lehman collapse. It was so ubiquitous that it even sparked some Internet chatter, including nasty comments on, surprise, Yahoo! message boards and a defense on the subject’s friend’s blog.

Now, papers do publish the same photo when it suits them. But the fact is that the Sept 16 photo doesn’t say very much and didn’t warrant the attention it got. Furthermore, we did a bit of digging and found that the trader depicted is something of a recurring subject on financial pages.

Even the NYT offered a photo of her that day, although not the same image and not on the front page. So did Reuters.

And an image search led us to even more photos of the same woman. Here she is earlier in September. In March. In October 2007. In December 2006. Again in December 2006.

It may be a small world out there. But not that small. The financial crisis deserves photography as serious and inquisitive as its best articles.

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