Image overload

The juxtaposition of a flamingo and a honey bee may not have doubled you over in laughter, but it had me pause while walking into a South Jersey farm market. And it made me smile.

Then I started to overthink it. Am I missing a joke here? “Q: What’s the difference between a flamingo and a honey bee?” Or, “a bee and a flamingo walk into a bar.”

Nope. That doesn’t work either. Nor does a meme about having “the” birds and the bees “talk.”

All this to justify picking that picture to feature with this column. Some weeks it’s an easier choice, and this week’s got me thinking about what in the newspaper business is called a standalone photo.

Aka, a photo feature or wild art, a standalone is a picture published without an accompanying article. I talked about it in a previous column (click bonus: the photos there are from a cold, snowy January day. Maybe refreshing to look at now, as we’re here in the dog days of summer).

In the heyday of dead-tree, printed ink-on-paper analog versions of newspapers not every story had a picture, so standalones were used when editors wanted to add some visual variety to a page that was all gray. That is precisely the 1998 origin of this column: it broke up a text-heavy page containing community news, calendars, traffic reports, school information, and volunteer listings.

Online publishing changed everything, and digital design evolved toward image-heavy layouts. Since our brains process pictures much faster than words, photos make a story more likely to grab a reader’s attention while scrolling.

Suddenly every story on news websites had an image attached. Pictures became plentiful.

And that’s the paradox. Even though the internet is highly visual, it favors rapid consumption rather than contemplation. Lost in the mishmash array of thumbnails on a website, it is harder to appreciate a storytelling standalone photo, or enjoy the much slower experience of pacing through a dozen images and captions in lengthy photo essays.

The web did not just become a bigger and better version of LIFE, Look, National Geographic — or our own Sunday Inquirer magazine (R.I.P.).

And that brings me around to a photo I saw this week. A reader submitted a picture they’d snapped of a young man outside Reading Terminal Market dressed in a solid-color button-down shirt with trousers held up by suspenders instead of a belt and wearing a broad-brimmed straw hat closely examining a parked Uber Eats’ delivery bot.

I reacted to it just as I did with the flamingo/honey bee, with a smile.

For decades the old weekly LIFE magazine had a standing feature on the last page called Miscellany. It was mostly pictures of people and animals in unexpected or humorous situations. A standalone.

Even with an abundant canvas there really isn’t a place on our website for a standalone photo — like the bot — without an attached story.

Or maybe there is. I have this column where my unattached images are displayed every Saturday and I’m happy to share some of the space (means less writing for me). So readers, if you see and take a picture like those on LIFE’s back-of-the-book page, email it to me.

(By the way, even though it was taken in a public place we wouldn’t have used the Amish/bot photo anyway. The subject may belong to a community that doesn’t enjoy being photographed, and he was minor. The photographer needed to talk to him — and a parent — to provide more context. But then it would no longer be a standalone.)

And remember, if a bee lands on you, freeze. Let it investigate and it will leave without stinging as long as it doesn’t detect a threat. If a flamingo lands on you, well, you’ve got a different problem.

Since 1998 a black-and-white photo has appeared every Monday in staff photographer Tom Gralish’s “Scene Through the Lens” photo column in the print editions of The Inquirer’s local news section. Here are the most recent, in color: