Birds of a feather | Scene Through the Lens

One of the summer’s biggest-earning images might not come close to the $1.34 billion a moving picture has grossed so far, but former President Trump’s Fulton County Sheriffs Office’s mug shot brought in $4.18 million to his campaign and defense fund on Friday alone.

While it’s no Barbie or Oppenheimer (or even Blue Beetle), Booking Photo #2313827 has to be one of the most anticipated pictures ever.

In his three previous indictments, prosecutors did not take mug shots, saying that it was unnecessary as Trump, even before he was president, is one of the most recognizable people on the planet. But the sheriff in Fulton County, Ga., said that everyone would be treated equally.

Many police departments no longer release their mug shots to the public (including newspapers and other media). The Philadelphia Police Department still does, but The Inquirer stopped publishing them along with crime stories three years ago.

When Danese Kenon, the newspaper’s managing editor for visuals, introduced the new policy, she wrote that we would still use police mugs where the photo “depicts a public figure, for instance, or if the alleged crime has achieved broad, regional or national notoriety.”

The Trump photo certainly met that criteria, and editors here discussed how to use it ahead of time on Thursday, and decided it would not be the main image on the next day’s front page (many other newspaper made the same choice).

That decision was made easier because on the same day we had powerful photos made by my colleague Jessica Griffin at the funeral of a young man, Eddie Irizarry, who was shot and killed by a Philadelphia police officer.

Still, the night was not without some newsroom suspense.

As our early edition deadline approached, night photo editor Jasmine Goldband was waiting for the mug shot to appear in our wire photo news feed, “refreshing it almost every minute from the time Trump left the Fulton Co. Jail.”

She was also simultaneously trying to get onto the Fulton County sheriff’s department website, but it was too overloaded.

(I asked her if she had flashbacks of trying to secure appointments online for COVID tests or vaccines.)

She did see a version that someone was able to grab there and post to X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter, but she didn’t want to use that because of the “risk of grabbing a fake, lo-resolution, and unverified photo. I knew if I could get directly from the county site or AP, that it was the real deal and full resolution.”

“We missed deadline by at least 10-15 minutes,” she said — the editors didn’t hold that edition waiting for the mug — but the page was redesigned right away, and it was there for subsequent editions, including the final online digital copy.

After seeing the mug shot, a reader asked if I thought it had been “professionally lit, with light and dark dappling, as opposed to the other defendants who have straightforward lighting.”

Pete Souza, the official White House photographer of Presidents Barack Obama and Ronald Reagan (and well-known thrower of shade at Trump) posted on Instagram a fictional phone call he made to the district attorney of Fulton County:

“I called Fani Willis last night to complain about the terrible technical quality on some of these mug shots. ‘You must do better!! I urged. ‘Look how washed out some of the faces are.’”

The shadows on the wall behind Trump do look different than they did in the mugs of the 11 co-defendants booked before him. But I have not read anything anywhere about any special lighting. And with as much that’s been said about the pictures, if something special were done we would’ve heard about it. Somebody - on either side of the political spectrum - most certainly would have revealed or leaked it. The sheriff’s booking photographer likely just got better with experience.

And about Trump’s pose?

Another former White House photographer, David Hume Kennerly, working for CNN, got a session with Trump after he had won the 2016 presidential election. He told NPR it started off with the president-elect smiling, but “it just, it didn’t look natural. And I said, ’How about giving me the you’re-fired look from The Apprentice?’ And he gave me that kind of a scowl — very similar to this picture that we’ve seen from Fulton County.”

That photo ran on the cover of the second printing of CNN’s book on the 2016 campaign, Unprecedented: The Election That Changed Everything. Trump tweeted “Hope it does well but used worst cover photo of me!” At the time it was thought the President confused Kennerly’s portrait with a news photo that appeared on an early printing.

“There’s a power to the still image, which is inarguable,” New York University professor emeritus Mitchell Stephens told the Associated Press. The author of a book about the place imagery holds in modern society and how it is supplanting the written word said the mug shot “kind of freezes a moment, and in this case, it’s freezing an unhappy moment for Donald Trump. And it’s not something he can click away. It’s not something he can simply brush off. That moment is going to live on. And it’s entirely possible that it will end up as the image that history preserves of this man.”

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 Inquirer’s local news section. Here are the most recent, in color:

» SEE MORE: Archived columns and Twenty years of a photo column