How do we represent something too horrible to represent? When 27 people, 20 of them young children, were shot and killed at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connectictut last month, many news outlets showed a photo of a police officer and a teacher leading a line of children to safety. Each child held her arms out around the shoulders of the child in front of her, as if it were some kind of playground game. There is fear on the children’s faces and one girl is shrieking. Yet the image doesn’t convey the extraordinary facts of the tragedy: that people are shooting at small children, and that twenty of them are dead. Except for a photo of the bloodshed, what could have conveyed that?
Six days later, after the victims' bodies had been identified and their families notified, The New York Times listed their names on the front page, in white letters, across a black field three-columns-wide and half-a-page high. Since the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC was unveiled in 1982, the act of listing victims’ names in memorial architecture has become standard practice, almost a design cliche. But the listing in the newspaper is especially powerful. It exploits the traditional broadsheet format: words on paper, black and white graphics, and the authoritative Times type face. The big black box, uncomfortably off-center, is severe. The italicized letters are stately, like those on a formal invitation, or a gravestone. Reading the list is wrenching. These children have the kind of enchanted first names (Chase, Grace, Aviella) we give children now, and last names (Irish, Italian, Chinese, hyphenated) that conjure something of their family life. Beside each victim's name the Times lists her age. All of the children were 6 or 7, and reading these numbers again and again is staggering. Even the ages of the adult victims, from 25 to 52, are irrationally young. The list capures a gravity and complexity that most photographs of the event just don’t.