Race and the Police - Published

My Race and the Police photo illustration was published today. We had a big conversation about it in my critique class. If you check my previous post, I posted the photo the way I envisioned it. An editor pitched the idea of cuffing together a black arm and white arm - I took that into the studio, added color for the "police" part, and got the image you saw before. However, when it came out today in print, the arms had been pulled off the background and put on a Black&White split backdrop. At first, I was upset to see my photo chopped up and my color completely left out, but after talking with my Director Of Photography, I understand why they did it.

Photo © Jason Lenhart for the Columbia Missourian

The reasoning was, that, with a black and white split backdrop like that, it made a more complete package. The way it came out on the front page, was a large, vertical spot, with opposite inverted text. It worked well as a package deal, whereas, if my color photo ran, not only would it have looked little off (color printing can be tricky - the blue may have come out a little purple), but it just would have been Headline - Photo - Text. I was upset about the whole ordeal for maybe about 5 minutes, then I got over it. Welcome to the world of Photo Illustrations.