311.1 Spring 2026

Table of contents

FROM THE EDITORS

Photography has shaped both our sense of the past and our understanding of the present. In an essay he wrote for the North American Review in 1935, William E. Berchtold noted how it had fed the American addiction for consuming news, calling us “a nation of ‘photomaniacs.’” As an ad man, he was keenly aware of (and would gladly exploit) the “demand for news and more news—but in increasingly compact capsule form.” Berchtold was an executive at McCann Erickson, Sterling Cooper’s rival advertising agency on AMC’s TV show Mad Men. The company’s founding motto was (and remains) “Truth Well Told.” They were the first ad firm to hire psychologists for research purposes and were responsible for famous slogans like Coca Cola’s “The Real Thing” and L’Oréal’s “Because I’m Worth It.” Deep down in our psyches, what do we really want? Truth. Reality. Worth. Another way of saying authenticity.

Walter Benjamin ends his prescient 1931 essay “A Short History of Photography” musing on authenticity in photography, a question he would return to four years later to develop and deepen in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” As cameras get smaller and are better able to capture fleeting moments, he asserts, it will become more vital to write captions that provide context, retaining an image’s unique historical presence, or aura, thus keeping it from becoming a merely aesthetic object.

#photography #authenticity #tbt

“The illiterate of the future,” Benjamin predicted, would not be “he who is ignorant of writing but ignorant of photography.” He couldn’t have known how utterly ubiquitous photography would become nearly a hundred years later in the everyday lives of regular people: taking them, publishing them, manipulating them, artificially generating them, gazing at them in an endless scroll on pocket-sized electronic devices we carry around with us all the time.

Benjamin’s analysis of the proto-surrealist photographer Eugene Atget offers a still relevant metaphor for understanding photography: “Not for nothing were pictures of Atget compared with those of the scene of a crime. But is not every spot of our cities the scene of a crime? every passerby a perpetrator? Does not the photographer … uncover guilt in his pictures?” The photograph tells the truth, becomes evidence of a crime, hitherto secret.

In her 1977 essay “On Photography” Susan Sontag would cast photography in criminal terms, too, but more provocatively so by flipping the scenario: “There is something predatory in the act of taking a picture. To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects  that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder—a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.”

Has a time ever been so sad and frightened as our own?

To wit, a tranche of thousands of photographs, hitherto secret, have recently been made public as the US Department of Justice was compelled by law to publish “all unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials … that relate to the investigation and prosecution of Jeffrey Epstein.” So far only a fraction of these records has been made available. Some of the photos provide evidence of a crime (sex trafficking of minors), others (redacted) are presumably crimes themselves as investigators gathered “loose polaroid photographs depicting young, nude females” and “numerous black binders containing … photographs of nude or partially nude young girls, some of which are in sexually suggestive poses.” Still other photos depict celebrities, public figures, and prominent politicians who moved in the billionaire’s world. Many remain in good standing—or even in office—today. Epstein may be dead, but for the American public, the jury is still out. Stand by.

Another recent crime photo—this one of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro handcuffed and blindfolded on board the warship USS Iwo Jima after being kidnapped by the US military—is sure to become iconic, perhaps evidentiary, or at the very least a meme.

From mug shots to crime scene photos to the gathering of visual evidence, the history of photography intersects with the world of crime. This issue of NAR showcases a number of essays written at this intersection. Summer J. Hart’s “Legacy” reflects on her mixed-race identity and her Native father Terry—murdered the year of her birth—integrating photography as the basis for her striking beaded artwork. Eric McHenry’s “The Ballad of Ollie Jackson” reveals the true story of an early twentieth-century murder ballad, along with a 1911 newspaper photograph of the man who inspired it. As a survivor of abuse, JoAnn Stevelos collaborates in “The Archivist” with photographer Sarah Blesener: “Trauma-informed photography, she calls it. I call it survival with a lens.” Mimi Dixon’s “Women in Difficult Positions” braids an analysis of Rodin’s watercolor nudes with, among other things, her memory of being a fashion model in her twenties and having her pictures taken. Of “the history of the female nude in art,” she asks, “is it a story of worship or of visual abuse?” Moving away from crime, Mary McAlister Randlett ponders sharing a name with the famous photographer in her intermittently speculative essay “Making (Up) Mary Randlett.” And William Stobb’s “Once and Future Kingdoms” is accompanied by photographs of the monumental earthwork City by Michael Heizer.

Flashes of photography also appear in some of the fiction in this issue. Jill Holtz’s “Genes” features a woman troubled by the intelligence of her husband’s family, noting the distinct noses of his ancestors in old photographs. Home for the funeral of his father, the narrator of Mathew Magro-Fry’s “Renovations” remembers in his parents’ house “so many pictures, they could have filled piles and piles of scrapbooks.” Other stories involve a range of crimes: An attendant in Robert McBrearty’s “An Alarm on Ward Five” averts a violent crime; a striking miner in Jared Sayet’s “Company Rat” spies on union meetings for a company man and is offered money to kill the union leader; the specter of murder haunts a small village in Savio Pham’s “Bible Study”; and the narrator of “Ride Share” wants to find out if there is a God and signs up to join a spiritual center, but maybe it’s all a scam.

A few poems in these pages highlight photography, too. The photo of a five-hundred year-old mummified boy in Greenland appears on the cover of a magazine in Michael Spence’s “Set Out.” Sharon Hashimoto’s “Shimmers on the Sheet” teases out a narrative at the Heart Mountain Internment Camp based on an autographed photograph of the actor Jackie Cooper. In “Breve Pausa” NAR contributing editor Martín Espada animates the photo of the Puerto Rican poet and pro-independence activist Juan Antonio Corretjer kissing his wife Consuelo Lee Tapia before they are taken away on charges of conspiracy. His poem “My Father’s Practice Book” aptly closes this issue as he remembers the work of his father Frank, a photographer and activist documenting the lives of Puerto Ricans.

Finally, we offer a hearty congratulations to Jarrett Moseley, whose quiet, urgent, soulful poem of love and loss “Micropsia” does not include photography or crime but was selected by Danez Smith as the winner of this year’s James Hearst Poetry Prize.

We’re excited to announce the revival of the journal Short Story. It will be published as an annual by the North American Review Press. (Enjoy a story in these pages by a member of our esteemed Advisory Board, Chris Offutt’s “Hot Tub”!) We’ll accept submissions until April 1 for The Short Story Prize, judged by one of our favorite story writers, Molly Antopol. The journal is open not only to literary fiction, but also westerns, thrillers, horror, crime, sci-fi, tales, yarns, and other narrative modes, forms, and genres. The image on the back cover of this issue is the journal’s new logo, aptly enough for these photography-rich pages, a lens, perhaps inside a camera, focusing rays of light. ⬤