A gripping photo and an everyday debate on its use

When you're a newspaper with a series of exceptionally high-quality photographs in hand showing citizens rescuing a teenager from raging floodwaters, you wouldn't think it would be that hard to decide what to do.

It's kind of like a famous soccer coach's edict to his strikers, "If you're in the penalty area and don't know what to do with the ball, put it in the net and we'll discuss the options later."

But earlier this week, the decision wasn't quite so clear cut for us.

In the first place, the photos were black and white. They were taken by a photography enthusiast who was out looking for striking images of the weekend's deluge when he heard the commotion of the boy's desperation and turned his camera toward the rescue.

As the spouse of a photography enthusiast who has produced a couple of decades of remarkable and unique images of our family life in black and white, I'm only too appreciative of the form. But in an age of full-color journalism and in the setting of breaking news, giving a black and white image dominance over all the images on the front page requires, at the least, special handling.

Even if the pictures were in blazing full color, a second factor also comes into play. On a day, when the story almost all readers are dealing with personally is the flood's devastation, wouldn't it be a bit misleading if the dominant image on the front page demonstrated an isolated event, dramatic though it may be?

Therein lay our dilemma, and editors fell into two camps - those who wanted to make full use of the drama in the pictures by playing one of them big and those who wanted to include them as a secondary elementary to our flood reporting, with possibly some sort of sequence employing several of the pictures.

Like so many of these situations, there was no right - and perhaps no wrong - answer.

Played large, several of the pictures were indeed riveting and one, that showing one police officer leaping over barricades to get to the scene where another officer was already assisting in the rescue, was especially eye catching. The urgency of the moment was evident in the expressions on each individual face and the tension in each person's arms, hands and shoulders.

Played smaller, they allowed our front page to reflect more common experiences around the suburbs through a more-traditional - if that adjective can be applied to such a time of crisis - flooding picture. With several smaller pictures rather than one large one, we also could better show the sequence of events that the writer of our story was describing.

We looked at various alternative page designs before deciding - and not with full unanimity, I should point out - on a modification of the latter approach. We used two moderate-sized pictures of the rescue atop a large photo of suburbanites rowing past a submerged car.

It wasn't a dilemma for all our editions. The rescue occurred in Des Plaines, so its interest was greatest in Cook. Indeed, since various parts of the suburbs dealt with the flood differently, we needed to and did customize our presentations for each region. But the debate did reflect the kind of thinking that must often go into how we display stories and pictures even on more-routine news days.

And, it also made us thankful for Web, where we could publish all the photos along with the story and where you could study them regardless of the region you live in, That decision, at least, was easy to agree on.