In the old days, these pages used to alternate more regularly between wedding work and the occasional rant. Lately, it's been pretty much just the former. And while this post probably doesn't rise to the level of the latter, a front page photograph in Sunday's New York Times raises some issues worthy of discussion.

The photo I'm talking about accompanied a huge story in the Times, titled "Driven to Distraction," about the dangers of texting while driving. It takes up two full inside pages, not to mention the above-the-fold 1A position. It has lots of disturbing data about the trend that most of us are probably all too familiar with on our daily commutes: drivers who pay too much attention to their phones and not enough attention to the road. For the most part, the story centers around the tragic death of a woman in Oklahoma City, killed when a young driver ran a red light. Turns out he was on his cellphone at the time and didn't even notice the traffic signal. Inside, there are photos of driving simulators, the dead woman's smashed car, and the texting driver himself.

But curiously, the big photo on page one that leads all of this off has nothing to do with that tale. In fact, I'm not sure what it has to do with, there's so little information given. The photo is a tightly cropped image of a person text messaging in a car, while his front seat passenger holds the wheel. It's cropped so tight that the photo feels almost abstract, without context. No highway, no swishing background, no faces. The caption reads, "At 60 miles an hour on a Missouri highway, a 16-year-old driver texts with a friend as a 17-year-old takes the wheel." And sure enough, if you look closely enough, the speedometer on the dash shows that the car is doing just. (Truth be told, it looks more like sixty-five.)

As I sat pool side looking at the picture, again and again, two questions kept running through my mind: who were the two teens in the photograph and under what circumstances did they end up driving and texting at 60 mph with a Times freelance photographer in the back seat?? Remember, the story is mainly about the tragedy of the driver and the woman in Oklahoma. It also quotes experts from Michigan and Utah and Baltimore. And yet it's all hitched to a bizarre and anonymous lead photo of two teenagers in Missouri, a state not even mentioned in the piece.

Now, having been a photographer and news photo editor at USA Today for several years, I know that in many cases the art used to illustrate a specific story comes from a paper's photo archive. For instance, if there's a bad accident on the Bay Bridge and traffic is backed up twenty miles, there might be some good traffic pictures moved on the wire that day. Those pictures all get archived. And someday, if an editor were to say to me, "Hey, Matt, we're doing a cover story on Washington D.C. traffic woes," I might think to myself, I know exactly where to find some great pictures to go with that story.

But that doesn't appear to be the case here. Judging from the "for the New York Times" photo credit, the picture was more than likely assigned specifically for this particular story. Which begs that second question: how did a photographer end up on this dangerous ride? Was he scared shitless? (Other photographs with the story show drivers using cell phones, but all of those were taken from a stationary position outside, looking in as the cars passed a photographer by. Only this one is taken from the inside a car.) Did a Times reporter hook the photographer up with some teenagers he or she had already interviewed, teens who had admitted to texting while driving? If so, did these minors--and I stress, minors--offer to show the photographer just how they did it? Or was it the other way: did the photographer and/or reporter ask the teens to demonstrate their incredibly stupid and potentially deadly stunt? (There might be a third scenario, perhaps that the photographer was in the car for something else and the kids started with the no-handed driving/texting, but without any help from the story you simply can't tell.)

Either version would be a bit less than kosher, if you asked me. There are ethical concerns that are raised when a journalist goes along for a ride with people engaged in illegal activity, especially if that illegal activity is being specifically enacted or re-created for the reporter or photographer's sake. Add the fact that kids are, well, kids and things can get even more ethically squeamish. Did the presence of a professional photographer egg these two on? That is, did these two teenagers ham it up a bit, pushing the envelope even further than they would normally? Even those of us (oh, let's admit it: all of us) who have texted while driving would think it downright crazy to hand the steering wheel to the person next to us while on the Beltway. I'd be curious to see the whole take and see what kind of percentage of the shoot this stunt took up. Was the whole shoot a demonstration of dangerous driving or was there another part to it?

I'm hopeful and confident the picture shows everything it purports to show. I have no reason to believe the freelance photographer did anything wrong. Two weeks ago, the Sunday magazine had to deal with a photographer who presented a portfolio of un-doctored architectural scenes that turned out to be manipulated. This isn't like that at all. We have every reason to believe that the kid was doing 60 mph without a hand on the steering wheel. We just don't know why or how.

When you have an above-the-fold photo of two unnamed minors engaged in this kind of behavior, you want some information. But the Times story makes not a single mention of the pair, essentially relegating the photograph to dramatic window dressing for a story about some other people in some other state. It seems weird that such a huge story would hang itself on main art that feels so disconnected and anonymous, not to mention so weighed down by questions about how it was obtained. There's probably a good explanation and I'm sure the circumstances under which the photo was taken were discussed at length by editors. As a reader, I'd like to know, too. 

UPDATE at 1:30 am: Apparently there are other folks curious about the photo. PDN Pulse just published a piece in which the photographer, Dan Gill, explains the mystery. Turns out the photo of the kids came from an unrelated Times assignment a year ago, one involving following a group of high schoolers. The picture was taken during the course of that project. Which brings me back to square one: why didn't the Times do a better job--or any job--of explaining this to its readers? By writing around all of this, the paper was hoping it could fit a pretty round peg into a decently round hole. We got this story here and we got those pictures there. Perfect. But it would have been better to have been up front about the situation and avoid all of the mystery.