That is hilarious! I went to a talk by the photoeditor of yahoo news - and he went on and on about the qualities of a good thumbnail. I gathered from his talk that he spends great time agonizing on NOT what the best picture is, but what picture has the best PORTION that would make a good thumbnail.

Doubt its related in THIS case, but it was interesting to me as well, so I thought I'd throw that tidbit out here too.

Neat collection. :) Wonder if it has to do with a photoeditor's perhaps natural bias - the photographer presenting a small view of what he sees to the larger world, pictures as a means of relating the world to others - a lot of these pictures look like 'shots' of presentations or of people observing things...the photographer observing the observer in some cases. Interesting.

Is it the BIG BROTHER effect the photographers are going after?

From JWZ's site:

I often scan through the wire service photos on Yahoo News, and over the years I started noticing a really strange trend. Many of the photos follow the same form: a picture of a person in the foreground, and on the background, a GIANT HEAD. Now, that's a clever picture once or twice, but it was happening so often that it really caught my attention. Was it always the same photographer? No, it turns out, it's not. So my best guess at this point is that one of the photo editors just has a GIANT HEAD fetish of some kind.

For no particularly good reason, I spent a year collecting them. Here, then, are the big heads of 2004.

Big Heads