ABSTRACT
This chapter conducts an analysis of the famous news photograph of Ruth Snyder being executed by electric chair, which ran on the front page of the New York Daily News in 1928. No photography of the execution was allowed, of course, but this did not dissuade the Daily News from commissioning a picture of the event. Because the presence of a local photographer at the execution would have been deemed suspicious, the News dispatched Tom Howard, a Chicago-based photojournalist, to attend the electrocution. Howard’s illicitly captured photograph was and remains to this day an extremely notorious example of photojournalism. Tabloid newspapers had long recognized (and exploited) the unique power of photographic images to render the news vivid and immediate. The difference between the News’ visual capture of the Snyder execution and the “descriptive language” of its rivals in covering the same event would have been clear to the paper’s editorial staff. Yet the primary claim of the editorial—that the publication of the photograph was “a feat” that would long be remembered—has proven quite accurate.
