A homemade explosive device is thrown toward police during an anti-Muslim protest outside Gracie Mansion in New York City, March 7. Photo: REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz

A round‑up of pictures that cut through the spin and highlight the fallout, from Iran to the home front.

By Michael Shaw

When the Fuse Comes Home

Trump insists that the Iran War keeps Americans safer at home. The picture says otherwise.

Last week outside Gracie Mansion, Emir Balat, an 18‑year‑old Turkish American now charged in federal court as an alleged ISIS‑inspired attacker, hurled this homemade explosive toward police during a March 7 rally organized by far‑right influencer Jake Lang to protest Muslim public prayer.

The confrontation reveals how Trump’s securitized politics and the post–Iraq War climate of suspicion have spilled over from distant battlefields onto American streets. All that imported warfare boils down to a single gesture: Balat’s hand gripping the taped-up explosive, with the fuse already burning.

Cartoonists, Save Us

Artwork: Doug Chayka. Via Coverjunkie.

The Iran War, Drawn in the Margins

In this not-normal, parallel universe, photojournalists—and just as much, if not more, the cartoonists—are the most straightforward storytellers we have. This cover reduces Trump’s Insta-war to a game he believes he can rearrange at will: disconnect here, flip a switch there, walk away from the chaos.

You don’t need one more text piece to explain the Iran War. The art already does. It You don’t need another piece of writing to explain the Iran War. The art already does. It demonstrates how impossible these wars are to compartmentalize, even as Trump treats them like a game of three-card monte.

They Think We’re That Blind

Cartoon by Tom Toro, New Yorker, February 19, 2026

You know I’m taken with those New York Times “Opinion posters.” This one resonates with Toro’s cartoon. The message is blunt—there is always something to see, especially when power claims there isn’t.

Everything He Touches

“Trump Will Destroy Washington if It’s the Last Thing He Does” is mainly about the illegal demolition of the East Wing and the fantasy White House ballroom. But the bigger picture is that his Midas touch reduces everything and everyone—save for himself and his fellow grifters—to rubble. While Iran might be the headline, the damage spreads through every institution he touches.

Eco Disaster, By Design

Smoke rises after a reported strike on Shahran fuel tanks in Tehran, Iran, March 8. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA

Trump and Netanyahu aren’t just bombing distant oil fields. They’re attacking locations in and around Tehran, poisoning the air and the people forced to breathe it. The strikes turn fuel depots into sources of toxic weather—acid rain, lingering smoke, long‑term health risks—while the president continues to urge them to ‘step up.

Walking the Wing

A member of the US Air Force walks on the wing of a B‑1 Lancer bomber at RAF Fairford. Photo: Toby Melville/Reuters

Posted in multiple ‘photo of the week’ galleries, it reads like a challenge. Against that peaceful, almost pastoral backdrop, the airman is walking the plank—only the plank is a bomber wing. It hints at a war without a plan, escalation as muscle memory.

A Perfect Photo for the Age of Resistance

US President Donald Trump salutes during a dignified transfer at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, Saturday, March 7. Six US Army Reserve soldiers were killed on March 1 in an Iranian drone strike in Kuwait. Photo: Julia Nikhinson/AP

This scene dominated the news cycle due to the breach of protocol—the hat worn at a transfer ceremony for soldiers killed in this war. But this image by Julia Nikhinson goes layers deeper. The hat alone carries heavy symbolism—“USA,” stamped with 45–47, collapsing Trump’s two terms into a single project and folding the country into himself.

Then there are his eyes.​

Closed, they can appear prayerful, holding a sense of sanctity in the weight of the moment. But they also reflect what we’ve observed for years: a man blind to his own responsibility for this war, of the fate of the troops, and of the consequences that follow from his actions. The photograph captures both readings at once and leaves the judgment to us.

On the Home Front

President Donald Trump at Coose Steel Corporation in Rome, Georgia, on Thursday, February 19, 2026. Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok

Gestures on the Economy

This photo, along with the one below, are White House photographs, folks. The hokey dance looks like flailing, with everything else falling apart. For an image promoting tariff magic and spiking gas prices to a worried country, it’s telling there isn’t another American in sight.

Hectorer-in-Chief.

People arrive before President Donald Trump speaks at Verst Logistics in Hebron, Ky., Wednesday, March 11, 2026. Photo: Jon Cherry/AP

The “Welcome, Mr.. President” banner stretches over a crowd waiting and waiting. In their posture and the tension in their bodies, the phrase becomes both a question and a demand. They’re not just waiting for dear leader; they’re waiting for results.

Measles Crisis Still Raging in the Dark

Do you remember my July post contrasting the tragic photo a vaccine-denying mother took of her suffering children with the empty propaganda of JFK, Jr., and the mindless stock images that illustrate countless health stories?

Eight months later, we’re facing a real crisis. The country is close to losing its measles-free status, as defined by the World Health Organization. Still, stock photos of microscopic viruses and close-ups of vials and syringes continue to dominate.

But look a little further, and the images grow darker.

Parkside Pediatrics providers Chandler Hash, left, and Nathan Heffington assess a patient with measles symptoms in Spartanburg, South Carolina, on Friday. Photo: Juan Diego Reyes/For The Washington Post.

There is an increasing number of photos like this: PPE-clad healthcare workers making home visits, working from pop-up clinics, conducting exposure assessments, and administering vaccinations linked to school outbreaks.

Makayla Skjerva, a 14‑year‑old from Cavalier, North Dakota, was airlifted to a Minneapolis hospital after developing severe complications from measles and other infections, despite being vaccinated; she is immunocompromised and still in recovery. Courtesy of Ashley Skjerva

Makayla lies unconscious, but the tattooed eyes on the arm gripping her hand stare straight at us, refusing to let us see a softened version of this outbreak. In my earlier measles post, I argued that images of real families in crisis are almost entirely absent from coverage, even as Trump’s HHS and RFK Jr. flood the zone with photo ops, sympathy tours, and vaccine “both‑sidesing” to minimize the damage of their own anti‑vax crusade. This frame joins those two tracks: a child bearing the burden of disinformation, and an accusatory gaze that pierces through the plywood signs, syringe stock shots, and carefully staged scenes meant to hide how serious things really are.

The post Caught My Eye: Trump, the Bomber, and the Blowback appeared first on Reading The Pictures.

These Opinion visuals from the New York Times make Trump the poster boy for his own Middle East blowback

By Michael Shaw

I’ve admired how The New York Times Opinion section collaborates with its photo, graphics, and design teams to pair bold visuals with its essays. The titles and images together have always felt like political posters to me.

I’ve compiled a collection of them dealing with Trump and the Iran War from its beginning, just over a week ago. They show a shift from spectacle to fallout, from Trump’s illusion of control and quick victory to the rising political, economic, and moral risks. They also mirror an editorial and national mood that quickly shifted from shock to skepticism. These are my takes. I welcome yours in the comments.

The one above features a fighter jet casting a shadow over a literal poster. At ground level, it depicts Trump’s Iran War as a bombing run over the once-isolationist, now “up in arms” MAGA movement.

The Times employs a similar double‑exposure approach across three articles—“The President of War,” “Trump May Come to Regret This,” and “Trump’s Fantasy Is Crashing Down”—but the meaning changes considerably over the eight days.

Initially, haze and stage lighting help portray Trump as a ceremonial war president, draped in flags, with the presidential seal on the lectern and a ghosted emblem behind him, echoing how past presidents have used the symbols of office to address clear and present threats. However, these same symbols are used to promote a war that is much more discretionary.

In the second, a fighter jet on the carrier deck is superimposed with what appears to be bombed-out targets on the ground, collapsing the gap between launch and impact and making the promise of power inseparable from destruction, which is exactly what the “regret” headline warns may return to him.

By the third, the podium and much of his head disappear, and his torso becomes a surface for rockets and smoke, making Trump and the war effort indistinguishable. The missile that seems to streak toward his head suggests he’s bringing danger down on himself as much as on the country, for once.

The red filtering turns the Capitol dome from a beacon into a siren, signaling the dangerous economic and physical aftermath of Trump’s war objectives. It’s also like a warning flare over Congress, the body that waved Trump through on his war‑making and now faces its own glaring abdication to answer for. As much as Trump claims to serve the nation’s interests, observe how the flag is also washed out in a sea of red.

Lessons from history for an administration that isn’t listening. The photo-illustration layers Iran’s clerical leaders, portraits that point back to the 1953 CIA‑backed coup and forward to the 1979 Islamic Revolution. It also includes echoes of Saddam’s statue coming down in Baghdad’s Firdos Square in 2003 and Cold War fallout, like the Stalin statue toppled in Budapest during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. This aligns Trump’s Iran gamble with a long record of Western regime‑change hubris and lessons he seems determined not to learn.

Maybe his crown hasn’t gotten any smaller; it’s Trump’s head that has exploded, which is quite something for a guy known for chickening out when he’s pushed too far. However, here, the shrunken crown on that swollen silhouette suggests that the narcissism of the “Teflon king” has finally overtaken him because instead of walking away from a war that’s already going south and risking the GOP’s midterms, he’s digging in even more.

Ow, what a double‑entendre! “Nothing to see here” fits the hyper-aggressive and hopelessly unqualified Defense Secretary insisting the Iran war is cut and dry, but it just as easily reads as “nobody to see here.” By the way, Hegseth insists on being called the Secretary of War, but nobody in the administration wants to use the same term for the “operation” in Iran.

The flag as a drape, akin to a cleric’s robe, is also a nice touch.

The angel symbol is perfect if you’re talking about Trump’s MAGA fall from grace, and it also works as an Icarus riff—extreme hubris, ignoring every warning.

Duty to Americans? Trump? The White House’s neglect in evacuating stranded Americans was just the tip of the iceberg, considering the oil shocks and shipping chaos, rising threats of retaliation, billions yanked from schools and health care for even more weapons, and more excuses for spying and crackdowns at home.

I just hope that coughing kid doesn’t have measles.

The post Trump’s Iran Debacle: A Picture’s Worth a Thousand Missiles appeared first on Reading The Pictures.

US President Donald Trump delivers his State of the Union address in Washington, DC, on Tuesday, February 24. Trump’s speech clocked in at about an hour and 47 minutes, breaking the record for length set by his address to Congress last year. Photo: Kenny Holston/Pool/Getty Images

The address to Congress was wall-to-wall military symbolism — medals, heroes, even Pete’s Blue Angel. It was everything you could ask for — except what a president is bound to disclose.

By Michael Shaw

Practically speaking, the war went live before the speech was even over. Within four days of Donald Trump’s 2026 State of the Union address, American jets were in the air striking Iran, a mission ordered in secret, without a public case, and without the constitutional consideration and approval the speech is supposed to support.

If you were watching from the House gallery or on television, though, you didn’t see a president leveling with the country about a looming war. You saw a showman surrounded by medals, war heroes, and hand-picked victims, staging a prime-time commercial for American force while burying the real operation off-stage.

That was the organizing lie of this State of the Union: Trump used the night to wrap himself in the symbols and stories of war — its hardware, its sacrifice, its glory — everywhere except where the law and the Constitution actually require it. In the longest presidential address in history — nearly two hours — he mentioned Iran for barely a few minutes and never laid out objectives, risks, or a rationale for what was already in motion.

US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth holds a model toy of a US Navy Blue Angels F/A-18 Hornet fighter jet as he poses for a picture before the arrival of President Donald Trump for the State of the Union address. Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

But for all of Trump’s dominance that night, the most telling image was Pete Hegseth showing off a toy Blue Angels fighter jet as he entered the chamber. The man in charge of the Pentagon appeared less like a sober guardian of the country’s defenses and more like a kid unable to hide his excitement for the coming firestorm.

General Dan Caine, the Joint Chiefs chairman, was considerably less ebullient. Reporting would later describe him as privately uneasy about the risks of a wider conflict, warning that any move without a clear strategy could spiral into chaos.

Photo: Kenny Holston-Pool/Getty Images

Here we see Caine and Senator Chris Coons, a ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee, bent toward each other before the speech began — the photograph now reads less as small talk than as a pre-reckoning. Coons would later call the Iran strike “an illegal war launched without meaningful consultation or consent of Congress.”

Inside the speech itself, war largely appeared as a backdrop for honor and uplift, and the pictures echo the heavy-handed irony. Each image is genuinely moving — and taken together, they turn military service into emotional scaffolding for a conflict the president refused to name.

Army Chief Warrant Officer Eric Slover receives a Medal of Honor. Photo: Kenny Holston-Pool/Getty Images

First lady Melania Trump presents the Medal of Honor to WWII Navy pilot Capt. Royce Williams. Photo: AP Photo/Matt Rourke

WWII veteran George ‘Buddy’ Taggart salutes. Photo: REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

Coast Guard Petty Officer Scott Ruskan. Photo: Kenny Holston/Pool via REUTERS

There was Marine Corporal Kenton Slover, standing at attention as he was praised for his valor; retired Navy pilot Royce Williams, saluted as a living legend from another era; Army veteran Shane Taggart, hand over heart in a tight salute, and Coast Guard Petty Officer, honored for rescuing people from deadly flooding.

But the camera didn’t just linger on the people Trump chooses to honor. It kept finding the people and abuses that his politics have helped to produce. In the same chamber where he wrapped himself in other people’s wars, the images also registered the wars he is waging at home: on women and survivors of sexual abuse, on migrants and their families, on people of color, on dissent itself.

Epstein survivors, including Sky and Amanda Roberts, brother and sister-in-law of the late Virginia Giuffre, attend Trump’s State of the Union address. Photo: Greg Nash/The Hill

The Epstein scandal had been breaking open in the weeks before the speech, with politicians, executives, and public figures around the globe losing their positions as the files and the names kept surfacing. The one place the reckoning had conspicuously stalled was here at home. The survivors in the gallery represent that stall. And within ninety-six hours of the speech, the Iran strikes gave the press and the public something else entirely to fill the zone — one of the more consequential deployments of that trick in the Trump era, given everything else that was buried. The faces in this photograph know exactly how the trick works.

As members stand and turn toward the floor during Trump’s State of the Union, Capitol Police move to remove Aliya Rahman, a guest of Rep. Ilhan Omar, from the House gallery. Photo: Nathan Posner/Anadolu via Getty Images

Aliya Rahman, a guest of Rep. Ilhan Omar, was grabbed and led away by multiple Capitol Police officers after she briefly stood up silently in the gallery — no signs, no chanting — even as people around her were also on their feet and news outlets documented nearby guests standing and applauding while officers focused on her alone. Rahman is an autistic, disabled U.S. citizen with a preexisting traumatic brain injury. In January, ICE agents in Minneapolis had shattered her car window, cut her seatbelt, dragged her from the vehicle, slammed her face down, carried her by her arms and legs, and prevented her from reaching a scheduled brain-injury appointment.

Aliya Rahman is gripped by Capitol Police as she is removed from the gallery. Photo: Frank Thorp V/NBC News

Rahman had warned the officers about her injuries before they hauled her out anyway; she was taken to George Washington University Hospital and later booked.

Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, holds up a sign as Trump passes on his way to the lectern. Photo: Kenny Holston/The New York Times via AP Pool

Representative Green was also ejected from the previous year’s SOTU for protesting — and the press and the GOP spent more time amplifying his breach of decorum than the what or the why. The fact that he was largely ignored this time is arguably worse.

This is what erasure actually looks like. Not a confrontation, not a reckoning — just a room so thick with the preferred version of itself that dissent becomes invisible. In any other era, Trump’s racial slur targeting the Obamas — posted on his own social media platform — would have consumed the country. Here, the invisibility of the words on a handwritten sign is nothing if not a testament to the depth of Trump’s authoritarianism and the grip of white nationalism.

What makes the photograph devastating is the compression. Green is literally sandwiched — Trump and his escort in front, a solid bank of white shirts and red ties behind, and to the side. The man directly above him wears a MAGA hat into the chamber, his own act of demonstration, unremarked upon and unpenalized. And on the far right of Green, nearly swallowed by the same crowd, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, in the pink of the Democratic Women’s Caucus — also barely visible, barely registered.

But what makes the photograph just as cutting is the room’s collective affect — laughter, bonhomie, performative celebration. The levity of the men in their uniform white shirts and red ties, the glee of the pols most accentuated just off Trump’s shoulder — all of it in tension with the deep disaffection on Green’s face and Wasserman Schultz’s, absorbed without a ripple.

The same logic that rendered Green invisible is encoded in the photographs themselves — except in these, it’s made official.

President Donald Trump looks at a tie featuring himself as he arrives to deliver his State of the Union address on Capitol Hill in Washington. Photo: Eric Lee for The New York Times

Rep. Troy Nehls (yes, the same congressman who moments earlier had tried to rip Rep. Green’s banner from his hands) wore a tie printed with portraits of Trump against an American flag — an act of idolatry so complete it doubled as a prop.

The exchange lasted seconds. The appetite it reveals ran through the whole evening.

Trump delivers the State of the Union as Supreme Court justices look on. Photo: AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein

One wire photograph places Trump alongside the Supreme Court justices and the Joint Chiefs — a formal picture that still gestures toward the constitutional order: the judiciary, the legislature, the executive, the military, all in one frame.

President Donald Trump delivers his State of the Union address, Tuesday, February 24, 2026, on the House floor of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. Official White House Photo by Andrea Hanks

But the White House released its own version of the same moment, and in that image, Trump is the only figure in sharp focus. The justices, who represent the independent legal check his administration has repeatedly tried to sidestep, are soft shapes at the margins. So are the generals.

That second blur matters on its own terms. Trump and Hegseth showed little patience for the kind of careful, layered military counsel that complicates a clean decision. The blurred Joint Chiefs in the White House photograph are a visual echo of that: the serious concerns, the professional caution, the institutional knowledge that might slow things down — all rendered indistinct, pushed to the edge of the frame where they can confer gravity without interfering with the image Trump wants to project.

That is the organizing logic of the whole evening — and, it turns out, of the Iran attack that followed. Pull the useful symbols forward. Blur whatever complicates the picture. And keep the actual decision, the one that required a declaration and a reckoning with the Constitution, carefully out of focus until the bombs were already in the air.

The post Trump’s Iran War Big Lie appeared first on Reading The Pictures.

By Michael Shaw

Heavily armed, masked federal immigration agents face a cluster of neighborhood residents filming them with their phones during an ICE operation that resulted in a car accident in St. Paul in January 2026. Leila Navidi/Minneapolis Star Tribune

Watch: Chatting the Pictures

Leila Navidi’s photograph for the Minneapolis Star Tribune shows St. Paul neighbors on a Cathedral Hill sidewalk on February 11, 2026, standing shoulder to shoulder with their phones raised as militarized ICE agents turn away.

What began as a spontaneous response to a high‑speed crash caused by an ICE chase becomes, in her frame, a rare picture of collective solidarity—everyday residents forming a united front, documenting federal power, and quietly claiming the moral ground.

While the image went viral, little was written about why it had such an impact. In our latest Chatting the Pictures video, we read it detail by detail, to show how its composition, timing, and gestures have made it a breakthrough resistance picture for this state and this moment. Watch now:

The events that built this picture

What follows are “companion images” that show how the Twin Cities had been visually building toward that moment, and how much Navidi’s photograph carries in a single frame.

Patriotism

A person carries an American flag on Nicollet Avenue after a fatal shooting by federal agents there on January 24, 2026, in Minneapolis. Photo: Stephen Maturen/Getty

The flag that once staged official power becomes a neighborhood standard here—an early glimpse of the homegrown patriotism that will crest in Navidi’s frame, when residents claim the street as theirs.

Solidarity

Residents pack a school auditorium as a community organizer walks them through the federal crackdown and ICE raids in Minneapolis, one of many neighborhood meetings that sprang up to understand the violence and plan a collective response. Photo: Jack Califano for The Atlantic

Residents pack a school auditorium as a community organizer walks them through the federal crackdown and ICE raids in Minneapolis, one of many neighborhood meetings that sprang up to understand the violence and plan a collective response.

Thousands of people endure subzero temperatures to protest the immigration crackdown in Minneapolis. Photo: David Guttenfelder/The New York Times/Redux

These rooms and streets are the scaffolding beneath Navidi’s stand‑off: a city that has already been meeting, learning, and shivering together, so that when ICE rolls in again, neighbors know instinctively how to show up with their bodies and their phones.

Doggedness

A local documentary filmmaker sprints behind a team of federal agents, part of a loose network of legal observers and neighbors who shadow ICE convoys across Minneapolis—filming everything while staying just within the bounds of the law. Photo: Jack Califano for The Atlantic

By the time we reach Navidi’s picture, that ethic of systematically following and filming has moved from lone individuals and resistance networks to a whole block of neighbors, turning pursuit into a spontaneous neighborhood reflex.

Key Icons

I’ll tell you one thing I’ve learned about Minneapolis: their commitment to protecting the community is strong. From observers with whistles monitoring city blocks to neighbors keeping watch over Sunday service to a citizen carrying an AR around his block to “keep his neighborhood safe from ICE,” you can’t say this city doesn’t care for its own. Photo: Carrie Schreck/Redux Pictures via Instagram

In Navidi’s photo, that commitment condenses into objects. At the far left, a woman stands with a phone in one hand and a whistle in the other, her body oriented toward the agents.

Protesters clashed with law enforcement officers for hours after a federal agent had shot a man while attempting to detain him. Photo: Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Closer to the center of Navidi’s frame, an agent’s chemical spray rides in his shirt pocket; to the right, a woman in a brown coat grips a water bottle, ready to flush someone’s eyes if that spray is used. The picture quietly pits weapon against antidote—state chemical agents against neighborhood first aid—turning domestic items into icons of everyday defense.

Journalists Represent

Photo: Carrie Schreck/Redux Pictures via Instagram

Here the journalist is not just a byline but a protagonist, part of the visible frontline. In Navidi’s picture, that role doubles: Sam Stroozas, the MPR reporter anchoring the frame in her bathrobe and slippers, and Leila Navidi, the Star Tribune photographer behind the camera, are witnesses of the witnesses, documenting a citizenry that has turned its cameras—and its attention—back on the state.

Minnesota Strong

Photo: Mostafa Bassim/Anadolu Images

Across Minneapolis, scenes like this show neighbors tending to one another in public space, reinforcing that resistance is also mutual care—rides, food, warmth, information. This is a city that learned, brutally and publicly, how to face federal force during the George Floyd uprising, and the administration misreads that history if it thinks Minneapolis will meet an ICE occupation with fear instead of practiced solidarity.

Navidi’s frame condenses that experience into a single confrontation on a residential street, where everyone is someone’s backup and no one stands alone.

The post The People, United, Will Never Be Defeated: Leila Navidi’s Photograph as a Defining Image of Resistance to Trump’s ICE Regime appeared first on Reading The Pictures.

By Michael Shaw

Crushing the Press

Press freedom is in retreat worldwide. The Economist. Design: SMLXL Co. Photo: Getty Images. Via Coverjunkie Week’s Top 10

The Economist’s cover turns that abstraction into contact: a hand not just on but bearing down on the camera, but each fingertip a pressure point you can almost feel. The hand sits between us and whatever the lens might see, a neat stand‑in for the way power now treats journalism—as something to smother, not to answer.

And in a week when the Washington Post took a hacksaw to the newsroom, including the entire Pulitzer-prize-winning photography department, the image doubles as a grim business plan. If you can’t quite kill the press, you can starve the pictures.

Gotcha

Tulsi Gabbard at an election operation center after the FBI executed a search warrant there, in Union City, Georgia, on January 28. Photo: Elijah Nouvelage/Reuters

Tulsi Gabbard stands in Fulton County’s election hub as Director of National Intelligence, turning up at an FBI search of a county election office tied to Trump’s long‑debunked 2020 fraud claims—a presence that blurs the line between her actual job, which is foreign spycraft, and local election policing in the name of chasing yet more phantom fraud. It’s an extraordinary show of top‑down muscle in a place that’s already been ground zero for efforts to discredit the vote.

The picture itself is fittingly grainy and low‑lit, with Gabbard dressed in black and half-swallowed by sheet metal, like a confederate lookout caught on a surveillance camera. The image feels like the boiler room where misdeeds get routed and laundered, with Gabbard as Trump’s war‑on‑democracy Rosie the Riveter.

Epstein Fallout: Horse of a Different Color

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor rides a horse in Windsor Great Park, near Royal Lodge, where the former prince lived until this week. British police are to review fresh allegations that Jeffrey Epstein provided Mountbatten-Windsor with a woman to have sex with at Royal Lodge in 2010. Photo: Toby Melville/Reuters

“Back in the saddle,” yes—but also on the most impossible horse you’ve ever seen.

For a split second, the tree splices the two animals into one creature, a dark, compact body with a pale, accordion‑like neck stretching out from behind the trunk. That visual glitch becomes a deadpan metaphor for Andrew’s split existence: the solid, recognizable shell of the country gentleman plodding on in Windsor Great Park, and a second, ghostlier self jutting in from the margins just as new Epstein files re‑locate him having his way with young girls at the nearby Royal Lodge.

Domestic Terror

A man is tackled after spraying an unknown substance at US Rep. Ilhan Omar during a Minneapolis town hall on January 27. Omar was unharmed and continued the event despite the attack. Photo: Victor Blue for The New York Times

A man lunges at Ilhan Omar with a syringe, his face twisted like a Goya figure, and the shot freezes the whole chain of custody of American political violence in mid‑air. The syringe becomes a weapon, Omar’s body the target, and the crowd’s shock the atmosphere that now attends a routine town hall. Trump’s response—that she “probably had herself sprayed”—folds the attack into his ongoing loyalty test, where a congresswoman under physical assault is less a victim than a prop in the performance of grievance.

The Erasures

One war clears land, the other kills the lights, and in both Gaza and Ukraine, whole populations are treated as expendable infrastructure—something to be emptied, darkened, and written off when the plans are done.

Israelis sitting near the Israeli side of the Israel-Gaza border look at rubble from destroyed buildings in Gaza, in Israel, February 4. Photo: REUTERS/Amir Cohen

On the Israel‑Gaza border, Israelis sit on plastic chairs and look out over the pulverized strip as if it were just a recently demolished construction site. In the American plan for Gaza, drafted by real‑estate moguls Trump, Witkoff, and Kushner, this is less horror than the “before” image for a future sales deck.

A lone figure in a headlamp picks through a blacked‑out street in Kyiv. Putin has spent two winters bombing not just apartments but the power grid, trying to freeze Ukraine into submission. Photo: Lynsey Addario for The New York Times

In Kyiv, a lone figure in a headlamp picks through a blacked‑out street while Russia bombs not just homes but the grid, trying to freeze Ukraine into submission. As Trump flatters Putin and patronizes Zelensky, the country’s prospects feel as anonymous and dim as the photo’s silhouette.

Cleaning our Clocks

High-speed trains are seen at a train station in this aerial photo taken in Nanjing, China, on Monday, February 2. It was the first day of the annual Spring Festival travel period. Photo: Stringer/AFP/Getty Images

From above, the high‑speed rail cars in Nanjing line up like a bar graph of the future, each track a measure of how fast China is building while we stall out. Look a beat longer, and you start to see the rest of the ledger—A.I. labs, E.V. plants, battery factories—columns where they’re cleaning our clock while Trump can’t get off the tariff train.

Politics of Sport

Big Brush With History

Photo: Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images

Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl set features a plantation‑like field of cane and brush. This halftime spectacle drags the Caribbean’s history of chattel slavery and U.S. colonialism onto the largest sporting stage—the grasses carrying their own code—Puerto Rican and Latin American landscapes, Florida detention camps. The gesticulating figures surround a work vehicle, even echoing migrant workers hunted by ICE. So the show reads as both a pop triumph and a land memory, a performance built on ground that won’t stop talking.

The Neighbors

Rocket Mortgage and Redfin’s Super Bowl LX commercial “America Needs Neighbors Like You,” a quietly emotional spot about two young girls in neighboring homes, pivoting off a darker cultural allusion

The Super Bowl ads did their usual work: sanding the edges off catastrophe to make it feel market‑ready. Don’t let racism, political polarization, and climate collapse ruin your Sunday—Rocket Mortgage and friends are here to help you finance around it. (Video)

Ringing Losses

Ukraine’s Vladyslav Heraskevych is wearing a helmet that features pictures of people killed in the war with Russia. Photo: Andrew Milligan/PA

Meanwhile, in the most achingly rounded medley of faces and rings, Andrew Milligan‘s image from the Winter Games showcases how Ukraine’s Vladyslav Heraskevych turns his helmet into a portable memorial, layering the faces of people killed in Russia’s war over the gear that’s supposed to be purely national branding.

It’s a quiet refusal of the usual Olympic neutrality: if you want the spectacle, you have to look the dead in the eye on the way down the run—and this week, he was disqualified for keeping faith with them.

The post Caught My Eye: Crushing the Press, Chinese Speed, Tulsi’s Tricks, Epstein’s Trail appeared first on Reading The Pictures.

A federal agent shoots tear gas canisters during clashes with community members at the scene where federal agents fatally shot Alex Pretti, January 24. Photo: Tim Evans/Reuters

As Trump sells ‘law and order,’ most of politics and media still treat ‘war’ as a metaphor. On the ground, photographers see it and show it for what it is.

By Michael Shaw

A federal agent is firing tear gas into a crowd. The visual grammar is combat: obscured sightlines, tactical aggression in urban terrain, and chemical weapons deployed against civilians. The fog—literal and figurative—shrouds what’s happening in the language of war. You could be looking at Gaza, Fallujah, or any number of conflict zones. Except this is Minneapolis.

The term “war,” as applied to the mission of Trump’s Homeland Security agency, remains overwhelmingly understood by politicians and journalists alike as hyperbole, as metaphor. Just like people mocked or shrugged when the Pentagon renamed itself “the Department of War.” But the depictions from Minnesota express exactly what the semantics indicate: in language, verbal as well as visual, it is what it says.

@Shoshibuya Minneapolis

The artists Shoshibuya gets it. His latest interpretation of a New York Times Opinion page not only captures the smoke from the attack on Minneapolis, the blotches of paint like shrapnel, but he “publishes” the words the media, like The Times, will not use.

Not just a war, but a civil war.

An American flag is waved as protesters face off with agents outside of ICE headquarters in Minneapolis on January 17. Photo: David Butow/Redux for CNN

This gray, primal photo by David Butow primes the comparison.

The composition of civilians watching federal forces at a fortified position, with the flag as the focal point, evokes the April 12-13, 1861, attack on Fort Sumter. The flag held by protesters facing federal agents marks the same contested sovereignty. That residents in Charleston expected a show echoes the same underestimation. Then as now—with the future of democracy on the line in Trump’s purge of immigration and First Amendment rights —‘war’ isn’t a flourish or a figure of speech. That’s what the pictures show.

Photo of an agent with night vision goggles. Photo: Jack Califano (@JackIsJackWas) / Instagram

Ultimately, the sight of federal agents armed to the teeth says everything before anyone moves. This isn’t crowd control. It’s insurgency.

The Fronts

War doesn’t move in a straight line. In Minneapolis, it’s advancing on at least three fronts.

The Civic Front

Smoke from burning dumpsters rises during scuffles between federal agents and community members at the scene of the shooting of Alex Pretti, in Minneapolis, January 24. Photo: Tim Evans/Reuters

Most images from Minneapolis catch isolated incidents—a single raid, a single clash with protesters, a single breached doorway. Phones record what’s right in front of them. This one does something else: it shows scale.

That’s why Tim Evans’ photograph traveled so widely. It’s one of the few pictures that makes visible what people only hold in their heads: this isn’t discrete law enforcement. It’s sustained territorial operations. Once you lock onto that, the burning columns stop reading as just a few fires; they become location markers, cries, and statements of resistance all at once.

The Removal Front

“It’ll be like a light switch when ICE leaves,” Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis said. “It’ll be a celebration.” Photo: Philip Montgomery for The New York Times

Philip Montgomery’s photograph captures an ambient terror spreading far beyond the streets where the agents actually operate. A person stands at the window, caught between private and public, safety and threat. Her gaze aligns with the camera, not on any federal presence off‑frame.

The window frame matters. In war photography, windows and doors often mark vulnerability—the moment before breach, the boundary that won’t hold. Montgomery places the figure squarely inside that frame, making the psychological operation legible even when no agents appear in the shot.

This is what systematic removal looks like at the domestic scale: uncertainty as a weapon. You don’t know when they’re coming. You don’t know if you’re next. The terror runs 24/7, even when enforcement is sporadic. That’s the design.

Teyana Gibson Brown reacts after a federal immigration officer used a battering ram to break down a door before arresting her husband, Garrison Gibson, in Minneapolis on January 11. Photo: John Locher/AP

The assault on Teyana Gibson Brown’s home is tactically identical to home invasions I documented during U.S. raids in Fallujah in 2004 and 2005: door-breaching, tactical stacks, overwhelming force against civilian residences. A New York Times video breaks down the equipment—silencers, MAWLs, M-LOKs—gear militarized since the Gulf War, standard SWAT issue, now deployed for immigration enforcement.

But the precise historical parallel comes from wars explicitly understood as systematic removal operations: Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda. In Bosnia (1992-1995), Serbian forces carried out house-to-house operations, forced displacement, terrorizing families. In Kosovo (1999), a centrally organized campaign to clear regions of ethnic Albanians.” In Rwanda (1994), door-to-door searches created pervasive fear.

What’s happening in Minneapolis fits this pattern. Sporadic raids, battering rams at dawn, the uncertainty of who is next—systematic removal carried out as a police operation, incident by incident, house by house.

The Press Front

John Abernathy throws his camera toward fellow photographer Pierre Lavie as he is tackled by federal agents in Minneapolis on January 15. Abernathy, who was covering protests, said agents set tear gas in front of him and sprayed pepper spray into his face. The Department of Homeland Security said he was arrested for obstructing pedestrian and vehicular traffic on federal property. Photo: Pierre Lavie @just1dudewithacamera

Photographers aren’t documenting this war from the sidelines—they’re targets. John Abernathy’s camera is mid-flight as federal agents tackle him, in a frame Pierre Lavie shot to preserve his images. Lavie later described reaching for Abernathy’s phone as a federal officer repeatedly tried to stomp on it—”I had to Hungry Hippo my hand in and out to avoid my hand getting stepped on,” he said.

The pattern is systematic: Jon Farina shot with crowd-control munitions; Zach Roberts struck in the head; Nick Valenciatear-gassed and shoved—all wearing press credentials. You can’t assault every citizen with a camera. But you can send a message by assaulting those who represent the fourth estate.

Photos Deeper Than the Denial

Photojournalists are not just recording the rituals of battle. In a highly charged, increasingly authoritarian political climate, they are tuned to the atmosphere around those rituals—the nuances, ironies, and visual echoes of other wars that emerge from contested narratives and propaganda. Their photographs register not only the clashes themselves but also the ways in which a society is gaslit into thinking it’s no war at all.

Photo: Mostafa Bassim/Anadolu Images

Given the circumstances, the many conflict- and terror-associated connotations in Mostafa Bassim’s image are not unreasonable. They converge in a single phrase: the fog of war. The shroud of the gas and the body language of the citizen at the far right remind me of Lower Manhattan during the fall of the World Trade Center. In the street, the trees, and the body language, a few might even see hints of The Napalm Girl. At the same time, the fog itself reflects the ambiguity of language—the way it obscures any attempt to call the siege in Minnesota exactly what it is.

Photo: The Final Eye/Instagram

The canister suspended in the air—mid‑arc, mid‑detonation. The documentary distance lets us study the moment almost clinically. That clarity cuts against the chaos the violence intends. The shock and awe, the ‘flooding the zone,’ are designed to traumatize—to make thinking impossible. The freeze-frame, instead, lets us process the fireworks rather than absorb their impact. It’s a portrait that says to Trump, Miller, and Noem: we get what you’re about.

Photo: Jack Califano for The Atlantic

Talk about a photo that goes the other way. The vulnerability in this agent’s body. The fear in his eyes. The sheerness of the mask, more like lingerie. Where the troops are largely untrained, barely managed, and operating with little plan, many of them are simply scared to death. Undermining the sense that Trump’s enforcers are all attack dogs and soldier‑of‑fortune types, this image captures a deeper truth: they—like the citizens hunted at their car doors—are equally caught in the crossfire.

The post The ICE Occupation of Minneapolis: They Call It ‘Security.’ The Pictures Say ‘War.’ appeared first on Reading The Pictures.

By Michael Shaw

Times like these—from state violence in Minneapolis, to Trump’s manufactured crisis over Greenland—demand we bear witness in real time. As most of you know, I have a weakness for long-form, a liability when urgency and the scarcity of people actually reading the pictures both call for speed. This new feature, Caught My Eye, is my attempt to stay present and respond with the turnaround these incredible images and events require.

Minneapolis: Escalation and Grief

I’m working on a longer post on the new civil war. In the meantime, let me share.

A protester has a chemical irritant sprayed directly into his face in Minneapolis on January 21, 2026. Photo: Richard Tsong-Taatarii/The Minnesota Star Tribune/Getty Images

Evidence of escalation as much as brutality, this photo—featured on the front page of the Minnesota Star Tribune—was taken three days before federal agents killed Alex Pretti. After an ICE agent shoved a cyclist, a crowd of bystanders and protesters surged forward, shouting at the agents, who responded by tackling demonstrators to the pavement and spraying this man point-blank with a chemical irritant.

More than any photo I’ve seen, this captures the political intent and psychic drive behind the Trump administration’s war on sanctuary cities: domestic terror and pure sadism.

A woman cries at the makeshift memorial for Alex Pretti on January 24. Photo: Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters

Evelyn Hockstein’s photo lays bare Minnesota’s grief over the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and the violent occupation of their city. The mascara running down her face makes the heartbreak unbearably immediate, while those heart-shaped glasses, the peace-and-love aesthetic straight out of the ‘60s, connect this moment of anguish to another generation’s resistance to war and state violence.

Denmark, Greenland, and the Mockery that is White House Media

Hillary Swift’s portraits from Copenhagen are everything the White House’s AI garbage isn’t: human, dignified, real. Swift captures the faces of Danes—veterans, artists, ordinary citizens—grappling with Trump’s threats to seize Greenland. You see their shock, their resolve, the weight of betrayal by a supposed ally.

Then look at what the White House posted from Davos: AI-generated caricatures that turn the crisis, Trump’s gaslighting and threats, into propaganda poster kitsch. It’s contempt on every level—for the Danes and the Greenlanders whose sovereignty hangs in the balance, for the notion that foreign policy deserves anything more than comic book panels and burlesque, and for visual communication itself.

Warming Overhead

Aurelio Justino Zitha, 68, stands in floodwater in his property after weeks of heavy rainfall in Maputo, Mozambique, January 21. Photo: Amilton Neves/Reuters

Water rises ankle‑deep inside a room that already looks half‑submerged in paint, the blue strokes on the walls reading now as tides and currents instead of decoration. The window is jammed with plastic chairs, absurdly suspended between inside and out, like improvised floodgates. Even the mosquito net, bundled uselessly high on the wall, reads as a white flag; the tools people once used to manage their environment are no match for an atmosphere that has slipped its bounds.

I don’t entirely grasp the physics in this frame either, but I recognize the politics: this warped little room in the global South is what it looks like when Trump yanks the U.S. out of climate pacts while fantasizing about strip‑mining a thawing Arctic and carving up Greenland. Do you think he’d have such designs on that ice if the shrinking polar caps weren’t opening new seams for mining and shipping, the same effect that is now supercharging the brutal snow and ice gripping half the country?

Suffering Cha-ching

How sad is the ad fed to this New York Times article? The juxtaposition perfectly captures how a piece about ‘brisk’ Goodwill sales in a shaky economy gets framed for the comfort of the well‑off. Set against a luxury‑jewelry banner, the thrift racks and bargain hunters become scenery in a matter-of-fact business story, and the pairing all but turns both into poverty porn.

The post Caught My Eye: Minneapolis; Copenhagen; Maputo; Manhattan appeared first on Reading The Pictures.

Image from a video made by ICE officer Jonathan Ross shows Renee Good in her vehicle in Minneapolis on January 7, 2026. Screenshot: Alpha News via AP

Trump and Noem spun her death into proof of her guilt. Forensic analysis proved them wrong—and photographs revealed the larger pattern of who lives and dies behind the wheel and on the street.

By Michael Shaw

On January 7, 2026, ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Good in Minneapolis. Within hours, Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem constructed their lie. Trump claimed Good had “run over” or “tried to run over” the agent—framing the shooting as self-defense. Noem went further, branding Good a “domestic terrorist” who “weaponized her car” and “attempted to run [agents] over and ram them.”

A presidential aide shows video of the fatal shooting to President Trump and New York Times reporters on January 8, 2026. Photo: Doug Mills/NY Times

Here’s Trump the next day, seated with New York Times reporters in a pre-scheduled interview, watching an aide hold up a laptop displaying the shooting footage. “Well,” he says, “I — the way I look at it…”

The performance is pure Trump: insisting, as the adage goes, that we believe him over our own eyes.

Screenshot: NYT Visual Investigations Unit

But the reporters had done their homework. The Times’s acclaimed Visual Investigations Team had analyzed the footage and determined the claims were spun out of thin air. (See the investigation here.)

The lie wasn’t just wrong—it was erasure. While accusing Good of weaponizing her SUV, Trump and Noem weaponized the narrative itself—turning her car from the vehicle of her death into evidence of her guilt.

The killing sparked immediate protest in Minneapolis. Demonstrators flooded the streets where ICE agents had killed Good, reclaiming the contested roadway. That’s where photojournalists went to work—not just documenting the clash, but revealing deeper patterns about vehicles, enforcement, and who operates with impunity on American streets.

The crashed SUV after an ICE agent shot Renee Good at point-blank range through the window, Jan. 7, 2026. Photo: Nicole Neri/Minnesota Reformer

Is there any chance that Trump saw the more graphic photograph of the Good’s car from the passenger side with the bloody airbag and the heart-wrenching view of the teddy bear peering out of the glove compartment?

Cars aren’t incidental to these killings—they’re central. They’re where civilians get trapped, where agents claim a threat, where rules of engagement collapse, where the kill shot happens. Photographers aren’t just recording what happened in Minneapolis. They’re interpreting a pattern: the vehicle as weapon, as trap, as contested space.

Reading the Swarm

Aerial view shows protesters clashing with police after Renee Good was shot by ICE agents in Minneapolis, January 7, 2026. Photo: ABC Affiliate KSTP via Reuters

At least a few dozen people have died in ICE custody or during ICE operations since Trump’s return, while an alarming subset of those fatalities involved vehicles. When ICE turns traffic stops and parking-lot encounters into battlefield raids, every car becomes a potential crime scene, exposing drivers and passengers to sudden lethal force and legal jeopardy.

The aerial view captures what Good experienced on the ground: a sudden swarm of ICE vehicles, no clear guidance, rules of engagement collapsing in real time. The following close-ups read the details of that swarm—the vehicles, the bodies, the small gestures that reveal who holds power and who faces the threat.

More Federal Agents are coming here to Minnesota, a day after an ICE agent killed 37-year-old Renee Good in Minneapolis. Photo: David Guttenfelder for The New York Times

Look at what David Guttenfelder captures the day after Good’s killing: two youths, heads out the sunroof, juxtaposed with a platoon of agents. The car creates a barrier between them and the swarm—they’re elevated, protected, watching the enforcement machinery unfold. In this frozen moment, they could be riding in a tank, heads safely out the top, observing from a position of relative security.

And yet, Renee Good was in a vehicle the day before, and she’s dead. These two Black Americans—occupying a momentarily “privileged” observer position in a scene defined by racist enforcement—are one agent’s reaction away from the same fate.

Protesters outside an ICE facility in Minneapolis demand justice for Renee Good the day after her shooting. Photo: Mostafa Bassim/Anadolu Images via Instagram

Mostafa Bassim captures a man leaning against an unmarked CBP vehicle, arms outstretched, in a gesture that physically reclaims the enforcement apparatus. He’s making deliberate contact with the vehicle—the catalyst of state violence—reversing the power dynamic. The lean echoes Trump’s propaganda lie that Good rammed an ICE officer, but here, the behavior is controlled, visible, and intentional. His outstretched arms emphasize caution and communication.

There’s something almost superhero-like in the posture—a figure about to take flight—conveying the dignity, agency, and respect that should be automatic for all citizens in normal times. In the hangover from the slaughter, Bassim shows protesters turning what was a kill zone into a site of visible resistance.

Federal agents search a driver against his red service truck in Minneapolis, the day after ICE killed Renee Good, January 8, 2026. Photo: David Guttenfelder/The New York Times

Another Guttenfelder image puts the shoe on the other foot. A bright red service truck—vivid against the grey Minneapolis winter—sits center frame, its driver pressed against the hood by two agents who manhandle him despite full cooperation. In the foreground, a masked agent in combat gear looms with his weapon—the militarized presence that now defines American streets.

These photos put the Trump/Noem narrative to shame. The agents operate with roadway impunity. The double standard is stark: who gets designated a threat behind the wheel, who operates with street-level dominance, and who pays with their life.

The post Roadway Impunity: Telling Photos After ICE Killed Renee Good appeared first on Reading The Pictures.

1.46 pm, January 6, 2021, Washington, DC, 2021. Photo: Balazs Gardi

Among hundreds of images documenting the Capitol attack, Balazs Gardi captured something different: a moment of quiet triumph that seemed premature then, but prophetic now.

By Michael Shaw

On the 5th anniversary of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump’s insurrectionists, I would like to highlight a photo from that day that stands apart. Taken by documentary photographer Balazs Gardi, it was shortlisted for the 2025 Prix Pictet, one of the world’s leading awards for photography and sustainability.

Unlike most historical documentation that captures a moment and recedes into the archive, this image has proven disturbingly prescient—its significance not diminishing with time but intensifying, as if it foresaw the continuing political turbulence and democratic fragility—an oracle of our current despair.

Most January 6 imagery documents a harrowing attack that was ultimately repelled. Gardi’s photo frames the event differently. As a portrait rather than an action shot, it possesses an eerie quietness, an assuredness, even a solemnity that sets it apart. Where other photographs show pepper-spray clouds, hand-to-hand combat, shattered glass—this image presents something more unsettling: a moment of stillness that reads almost as an anointment.

At the center stands a figure dressed in Revolutionary War regalia, framed in a heroic pose that immediately evokes Emanuel Leutze’s “Washington Crossing the Delaware.” The composition is strikingly similar—a central figure in period costume, surrounded by compatriots, captured at what the image itself insists is a historic turning point. But where Leutze painted the founding of American democracy, Gardi has photographed what now appears to be the rehearsal for its unmaking. The revolutionary costume isn’t cosplay or irony—in this frame, it reads as a genuine claim, a declaration that this moment, this movement, represents the true inheritors of 1776.

Behind the figures looms the Capitol dome, shrouded in scaffolding. That scaffolding—meant for restoration and preservation—takes on devastating symbolic weight. The building appears wounded, vulnerable, literally under reconstruction. It’s as if the photograph captured the republic itself in a state of incompletion, its protective shell removed, exposed to those who would remake it in their own image.

The trappings are all there: the triumphant postures, the sense of historical inevitability, the quiet confidence of those who believe they’ve already won. And they may not have been wrong. While the government didn’t fall on January 6, 2021, the victory this photograph depicts is being realized. Trump was reelected. Congress, thus far, at least, has been neutralized. Constitutional constraints have been disregarded with impunity.

What seemed like a failed attempt may have been the turning point—and Gardi’s lens somehow knew it.

The post The January 6 Photo That Knew appeared first on Reading The Pictures.