Has the NYT taken up Shoe Fauxtography?
The image on the home page of The New York Times website is startling. A bombed out building in Gaza with a single brightly colored child’s shoe in the middle of the photo. The imagery is powerful, particularly the contrast between the blackened floor and the bright cheerful color of the shoe. But something doesn’t seem right here. As seen in the image, how is it that everything is blackened, except for the shoe? And the shoe is laying flat on the ground, in the middle of the picture, with nothing else around it. Highly unlikely. More likely, staged.
So I did a search on the photographer, Abid Katib, and found that he has a shoe fetish, and many of his other shoe pictures look staged. [Note: Due to Blogger technical limitations, I’ve posted the other photos referenced in this post directly below in a separate post.] There is the picture from November 2008 of two children’s shoes in the mud in Gaza reportedly after an Israeli strike. And the photo of multiple shoes and children’s toys close together at the scene of a supposed Israeli artillery shelling in June 2006.