A PHOTOGRAPH FOR THE AGES

At first I thought it should be blocked a little tighter; maybe take off some of the window behind the silver-haired man. You could zoom in and just have him in the big stuffed armchair with the simple wooden chair on the left. The one that held the American flag, folded in a blue star-spangled triangle.
Not just that. The man looked sunken and small in the frame, barely rising to the halfway point, and maybe centered too much. There was a lot of windows and sunlight in the upper third. Couldn’t that be trimmed a little?
The more I looked at the picture, the more I realized that the Sunday Oregonian had gotten it exactly right. This was Randall Walker of Pendleton, awaiting further details on the return of his son’s body from Iraq.
To get any closer to this man in his grief would have been wrong, even in a picture. The sunny windows represented all that was good about family and home, and there the man sat, small and alone, feeling the impossible pain.