Here is a look at some iconic images:
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Distilling the moment
The day after the marathon, the photograph of Iffrig appeared, large and hi-definition, on the front page of dozens of newspapers around the country: the Chicago Tribune, the Arizona Republic, the Orlando Sentinel, The Washington Post. By Wednesday it had gone international. In Ireland, Germany and Belgium, Iffrig lay on the pavement under headlines in foreign languages. Sports Illustrated announced that the picture would become its cover for the week of April 23.
“It’s the simplicity,” says Sarah Leen, a senior photo editor at National Geographic Magazine, when asked about the Iffrig photograph. “It’s full of symbols that represent the event . . . You have a runner, so you know it’s a race. But the runner is in distress, so you know something bad has happened.”
It is, emotions aside, a well-composed photograph. The colors, the lighting and the mood all interact as if they had been organized, rather than desperately captured by Boston Globe photographer John Tlumacki, who himself felt the force of the explosion.
The Iffrig photograph, Tlumacki says in a telephone interview, conveys the sounds and the smells — “the firecracker smell” — that were present at the finish line that day. It’s the photograph he took that he feels represents what it was like to be there
