Censorship in Nora Ephron’s The Boston Photographs Essay

The Necessity of Truth: Censorship in Nora Ephron’s â€Å"The Boston Photographs† Originally published in 1975, Nora Ephron’s essay â€Å"The Boston Photographs† is both still relevant and controversial almost forty years later. It deals with the series of three photographs that were published in newspapers across the country. The most important one shows a mother and child falling off a collapsed fire escape. Both have their limbs outstretched. If both had survived, maybe the reaction would have been different. The child survived by landing miraculously on the mother, but the mother ended up dying. The question on everyone’s mind was why the photographer, Stanley Forman, decided to take the photographs instead of trying to help the falling†¦show more content†¦Though the photograph is indeed controversial, he is talking about the different nature of controversial photos themselves, and a bare female breast, something seemingly innocuous, would certainly not be printed in a newspaper, so did the papers have right to print images showi ng â€Å"a human being’s last agonized instead of life?† I believe they did have the right, and nothing should have been censored. Ephron says of Seib that â€Å"although as an editor he would probably have run the pictures, as a reader he was revolted by them† (319). But again, though we as readers may be initially revolted by it, tragedy happens and always will. Not only that, but there should be that responsibility of photojournalists to give us the truth in the news instead of either censoring something or not printing it at all. According to Ephron, the backlash surrounding the calls, letters, and the reactions from Seib were from one main factor: â€Å"the death of the woman† (320). She argues that if the woman survived, there would be no protest, as the pictures â€Å"would have had a completely different impact† (320). But is that still a good enough reason to censor them or not print them at all? Though it remains sad, the photos are news, and a photojournalist’s job would be to snap the photographs in that controversial time. Ephron writes, â€Å"For it may be that the real lesson of the Boston photographs is not the danger that editors will be