You don’t need an art critic or a professional commentator to tell you why The Photo is “iconic,” to use the overused term. Trump looks defiant in the face of death. There’s an American flag in the background. It’s well composed.
None of this is expert-level analysis. It’s what you already knew the first time you looked at it.
As for the comparisons that have been made of The Photo to Daumier’s The Uprising (Charles Blow), or Miró’s Aidez l’Espagne (Jonathan Jones), or Stallone as Rocky (Benjamin Wallace-Wells), or Mohammed Ali standing over Sunny Liston (Nico Hines), it is unclear to me that they amount to more than a grab bag of visual references that pad “this is a powerful photo” to article length.
Ryan Broderick, of the great Garbage Day newsletter, rolls his eyes at Jason Farago’s piece for the New York Times for saying that the image could be compared “to Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (1830)… or John Singleton Copley’s Death of Major Peirson (1782—84)”—though that’s a bit unfair, as Farago raises these comparisons only to bracket them and say you shouldn’t raise them.
Newspapers on display at a shop in Sydney on July 15, 2024, show the headlines and photos after the assassination attempt on former US president and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13, 2024. (Photo by DAVID GRAY / AFP)
Jones, in The Guardian, says that “with one image, [Trump] may have won the 2024 U.S. presidential election.” Philip Kennicott, in The Washington Post, says that it is so powerful that the photograph “will create a reality more real than reality” and “will change America forever.” The British blowhard Piers Morgan declared just hours after Evan Vucci’s photo went up that it was “already one of the most iconic photographs in American history—and one that I suspect will propel Donald Trump back to the White House.”
An attempted political assassination is a cataclysmic event, one that will quite logically have major political consequences. The Photo is powerful—so powerful that on Tuesday Axios cited an unnamed photo editor saying that “it’s dangerous for media organizations to keep sharing that photo despite how good it is.” (Fox News has turned that statement into a story itself.)
I do worry that, because the tail of social media wags the dog of criticism, the snap art comparisons tend to work to falsely freeze how we feel now, in the present, into the semblance of something eternal (this commentary on the meaning of the image is all happening before we even know what the actual motive of the would-be assassin was). I worry that this stampede is part of the unstoppable movement toward a “post-news” environment of pure commentary.
Yes, The Photo is going to have a big political impact—but at least in part because liberal political operatives and pundits invest so much in stagecraft and image. Way too many chips have been placed on the single narrative that Trump’s uniquely unappealing image would be his undoing. “Images are more persuasive than anything else,” former Obama/Biden advisor and MSNBC host Jen Psaki said just a few months ago, arguing that Trump’s mugshot would sink him, even as his supporters immediately embraced it as cool.
Copies of Republican presidential candidate, former U.S. President Donald Trump mugshot are seen on the first day of the Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum on July 15, 2024 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. (Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images)
Because “Trump is a clown” is a primary political story that the liberal base has been told, the freeze-frame of the man looking magnetically defiant has a particularly overawing power for this audience. A huge mental barrier between imagining him returning to the White House is breeched.
The flip side is that the Democratic political-consultant mindset has put a lot of stock in beating Trump at the meme game—the mentality that “the right brand-safe viral stunt can Break The Internet and capture the hearts and minds of America,” as Broderick put it. Seriously, instead of talking about Project 2025, Biden’s final post before the presidential debate was to show himself drinking a can of water called “Dark Brandon’s Secret Sauce” (sold for $4.60 on his campaign website!), trying to mock Trump for saying he needed performance enhancers to speak.
And then Biden went onstage—and the Democratic faithful realized that actually their party had been keeping the truth from them, and that the idea that Biden was unwell is not just a matter of deceptively edited “cheapfake” videos, as the White House and sympathetic pundits had insisted right up to that day.
The spectacle of political violence is frightening on its own. But I think the shock of Saturday’s assassination attempt is combining with the shock of these ruptured narratives as people process The Photo.
The theorist Roland Barthes famously talked about how images became “mythologies,” by which he meant how they sneakily became more than what they literally represented. The way, for instance, a photo of a young Black soldier saluting the French flag on the cover of a ’50s French magazine showed a real person, but also was being deployed in the midst of the Algerian war to insinuate “that France is a great Empire, that all her sons, without any color discrimination, faithfully serve under her flag.”
As an image, Evan Vucci’s photograph has huge mythological power. But what is the content of the myth, if you actually unpack it?
The literal meaning is of a bloodied Trump yelling “fight!” to supporters after nearly being killed. That’s what it denotes. As for what it connotes, the meaning that it assumes that makes it a symbol… well, the composition’s resonances with Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima, or Liberty Leading the People, or Norman Fucking Rockwell are all not what you need to be focusing on.
Obviously: If Trump didn’t seem so resilient, if he was way behind in the polls, and if Biden hadn’t just face-planted, The Photo wouldn’t be lit up with this particularly overwhelming symbolic charge. It would be powerful, aesthetically, but not powerful in the sense of making people say, “the election is over.” In this case, the immediate political situation is the content of the myth.
Merchandise supporting Donald Trump on display during the second day of the 2024 Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, July 16, 2024. (Photo by Patrick T. Fallon / AFP)
And I’m genuinely surprised by how little the takes on The Photo dealt with this. In fact, The Atlantic’s Tyler Austin Harper does mention those who, in the wake of Saturday’s events, “juxtapose pictures of Joe Biden, staring awkwardly and looking frail, with an angry, almost-assassinated Trump”—only to shoo this symbolism away, saying that it “misses the point.” He then wanders off to say liberals should instead take the picture as “a badly needed window into the MAGA mindset.”
In their art-critic reads of The Photo, Jones and Kennicott both ascribe to the images of the event the ability to transform political reality (with stop offs at the “perturbing vision of a triumphant Jesus in the Isenheim Altarpiece” and the “rich stew of analogies and symbols” associated with shoes, respectively). They both do so mainly by imagining what they think The Photo’s symbolism will be to certain kinds of Trump supporters, not themselves.
But The Photo’s effect can only feel so inevitable, at this moment, because of the collapse of any plausible political narrative that the liberal imagination can see changing the course of events. I have the feeling that such criticism functions to let the audience of liberal publications consume their own alarm and despair as a form of entertainment, crediting a feeling of helplessness to the overpowering force of a picture.
Believe me, I share the sense that the future looks alarming. But I think that we have to be honest about why it looks that way if we ever want it to be less so. And I hate to think that art criticism is one of the things that gets in the way of seeing clearly.
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