{"id":20853,"date":"2021-06-20T01:17:57","date_gmt":"2021-06-20T05:17:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/?p=20853"},"modified":"2021-06-19T15:52:57","modified_gmt":"2021-06-19T19:52:57","slug":"a-photograph-to-remember","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/a-photograph-to-remember\/","title":{"rendered":"a photograph to remember"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Tom Howard’s famous photo<\/p><\/div>\n

Toronto<\/strong>. The other night, my wife and I were watching an old 1933 movie featuring James Cagney<\/a> called, “Picture Snatcher<\/a>“. The flick was about a NYC hoodlum who wanted to go straight by being a reporter. He was hired by the alcoholic editor of a ‘yellow journalism rag’ that used a photograph to illustrate and support each story – the worse the tale, the better.<\/p>\n

At one point Cagney’s character returns to Sing Sing under false pretences to illegally snap a photo of the execution of a woman (with a Leica on his ankle). After a few minutes of thought, I said to my wife, “That actually happened, you know. The woman was Ruth Snyder photographed at her execution in 1929<\/a>“.<\/p>\n

Turns out I had the date wrong. The execution was in January 1928, not 1929. The photo was taken for the NYC Daily News<\/a> by an out-of-towner unknown to police, Tom Howard. Howard used a single shot miniature camera<\/a> (one source said it was made by Leica, but I doubt it). Only a tiny portion of the negative actually captured the now dead body of Snyder and the fuzzy result was plastered across the Daily News’s front page, sparking a massive change in police protocol since such sensationalism was verboten.<\/p>\n

Note: I once again used a riff on the title of Walter Lord’s Titanic book<\/a> for the title of this post.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Toronto. The other night, my wife and I were watching an old 1933 movie featuring James Cagney called, “Picture Snatcher“. The flick was about a NYC hoodlum who wanted to go straight by being a reporter. He was hired by … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1944],"tags":[61,1276,520,3723,3722,327,613,495,3724],"class_list":["post-20853","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","tag-leica","tag-miniature","tag-news","tag-news-jornalist","tag-news-pghotographer","tag-nyc","tag-photo","tag-photograph","tag-single-shot"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20853","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20853"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20853\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20877,"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20853\/revisions\/20877"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}