A Year of Looking at News Photos

It would be hard to fault even the most ardent Bag reader for missing even our best work in a given year. There is so much great content out there spanning so many important topics, and only so much time. On the other hand, nobody else on the web does what we do — at least not with the breadth, consistency and singularity. In our news and social media-saturated world, news photos are used, confused and sometimes abused to entertain as well as inform, to persuade or sell as well as illustrate.

In 2014, Bag’s tenth year, the breadth of our mission crystallized into three distinct offering, BagNewsNotes, our news- and documentary photo-reading section; our online discussion series, the BagNewsSalon, analyzing visual media’s depiction of the major stories of the day; and BagNews Originals, publishing original photography accompanied by the words of the photographer describing his or her process. As the mainstay of the Bag, the Notes section — with an increasing number of authors joining me — seemed to finally arrive and settle on four concerns: photo forensics and investigative journalism; photo reviews and critique; photo analysis; and visual politics — our emphasis still overwhelmingly concerned with the individual image.

I appreciate what we offer you below in this stem-to-stern tour of our best work is still a lot of material. If you missed some or many of these entries though, especially in areas more to your taste, here are the pieces that rocked the photo sphere, or at least, kept visual media honest; made us all look deeper and longer at worthy images in our otherwise one-click-and-out visual culture; helped us appreciate how much critical reading we can do with our eyes; and otherwise honored and took joy in the profession.

As always, thank you for sharing the mission with us.

Photo Forensics and Investigative Journalism