Threat Level Orange

In my mind, the black-and-white era of news photography ended on September 11. I see the front page of the New York Times that morning, an image of the blue sky framing two gray buildings whose rows and columns resemble a newspaper’s. One of the buildings is being pierced by an airplane, or what was recently an airplane. I don’t see the collision itself — only the remnant of the plane and the orange fire bursting back toward the viewer.

None of this is historically accurate. The orange fire could not have appeared in the paper that morning, and in any case the photos of September 11 weren’t the first use of color on the front page of the Times. That shift occurred four years earlier. The front page for October 16, 1997, features two color photos, one of a pale gray Cleveland Indians uniform, the other of Janet Reno in a dark gray outfit testifying in front of the House Judiciary Committee. With the exception of a coach in a red jacket, everything in the photos is decidedly muted.…