Excerpted from "The Photos we'll Never See," by Paul Vitello.  Newsday, Dec. 4, 2003

 

Photo images - not the staged ones, but the ones that capture life unfolding in all its unpredictability and awesomeness - are among the most powerful informers of the national conscience. Without them, we are left making only choices that have been stage managed: To vote or not, to shop or not, to see or look away.

When a woman was trampled by a crowd of shoppers running for DVDs on sale at Wal-Mart last week, there was no photographer on hand to snap the picture.

But the image of that woman, huddled on the floor as others walked over her "like a herd of elephants," according to her sister, is near the top of my list of the year's indelible, if unphotographed, images. (The woman survived.)

When I think of Wal-Mart, or holiday shopping, or DVDs - or this year's model of the American conscience - I see that picture, the unedited emblem of American consumerism in its most extreme form: the willingness to kill for bargains.

It is of a piece with the other unpublished photos in my loop - at least according to the photo editor in charge of my darkroom this year.