Face Of The Day

From The Archive: The First Face Of The Day

by Chris Bodenner

Andrew published it on February 13, 2007:

With this photo, I’m going to try to introduce a new feature, made possible by the Atlantic’s Getty Images subscription. I hope to take the time each day to review as many of the news photographs in the past 24 hours and find a simple face to express something somewhere that is going on in the world. This is a depressing start, but I hope to include the full variety of human experience captured by Getty’s superb photographers. The criteria are simply a face and the past day.

The caption:

An Iraqi man injured in a car bomb explosion lies on a hospital bed February 12, 2007 in Baghdad, Iraq. On the anniversary of the attack on the Al-Askariya Mosque, five explosions went off in Baghdad including at least two car bombs at the Shorja market killing at least 80 people and wounding approximately 190. By Wathiq Khuzaie/Getty Images.

Faces Of The Day

by Chris Bodenner

Members of the gay community attend the Uruguay Senate’s discussion of a marriage equality bill in Montevideo on April 2, 2013. By Miguel Rojo/AFP/Getty Images. The day ended with good news:

The Uruguay Senate passed marriage equality legislation Tuesday, a sure sign that it will become the fourth nation in Latin America to establish marriage equality in some sense, as President José Mujica has said he intends to sign the bill into law. … According to Freedom to Marry, Uruguay will join 11 other countries with marriage equality (The Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Canada, South Africa, Norway, Sweden, Portugal, Iceland, Argentina, and Denmark), in addition to three others (Brazil, Mexico, and the United States) where marriage is legal or recognized in designated regions.

President Barack Obama stands in front of the Easter Bunny while he participates in the annual Easter Egg Roll on the White House tennis court on April 1, 2013. Thousands of people are expected to attend the 134-year-old tradition of rolling colored eggs down the White House lawn that was started by President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1878. By Mark Wilson/Getty Images.

David Rosenberg admires the work of Gillian Laub. From a series documenting her own family:

Although she’s covered hard-hitting stories of life in the Middle East and segregated high-school proms in the South, Laub’s images are often reminiscent of family portraits, with their intimate and deeply personal style. …

“I am very interested in tradition and ritual, so naturally every family holiday and ritual I will be photographing,” Laub wrote. Recently Laub became a mother for the first time and said the experience feels as if everything has come full circle. “I have spent so many years photographing other people’s children, so to now photograph my daughter with my mother and grandmother is pretty amazing.”

(Grandma Feels My Belly, Mamaroneck, N.Y., 2012 by Gillian Laub, courtesy of Bonni Benrubi Gallery)

Face Of The Day

Mixed media by Januz Miralles, from the series “Nothing To See Here.”

Face Of The Day

An Easter bunny-shaped snowman stands on the snow-covered Strandbad Wannsee beach during its opening for the year on March 29, 2013 in Berlin, Germany. Despite continued unseasonably cold temperatures in the country, organizers opened the beach for bathers in time for the last weekend of March, when Easter Sunday is expected to be colder than the previous Christmas Day had been. By Adam Berry/Getty Images.

Faces Of The Day

From the Queer Museum, the story behind this photo from 1970:

Edna Knowles, on the left, and Peaches Stevens were wed in Liz’s Mark III Lounge, a gay bar on the South Side of Chicago, “before a host of friends and well wishers.” The article ended by noting, “although the duo has a type of ‘marriage license’ in their possession, the state’s official marriage license bureau reported it had no record of their license.” This ending serves to remind Jet readers that Knowles and Stevens’ union was not legitimate in the eyes of the state, as does the use of quotes around the word “married” in the headline.

However, decades prior to this bold public display of queer affection, African American female couples in New York strategized alternative ways to obtain marriage licenses in the 1920s and 30s:

“Marriage ceremonies were held with large wedding parties which included several bridesmaids, attendants, and other wedding party members. Actual marriage licenses were obtained by either masculinizing the first name, or having a gay male surrogate obtain the license for the marrying couple. These marriage licenses were placed on file with the New York City Marriage Bureau.” – Luvenia Pinson, “The Black Lesbian: Times Past-Time Present,” Womanews, May 1980 p. 8.

This is very new from the point of view of legal and heterosexual America. But marriage between two people of the same gender is as old as gay and therefore human history.

Face Of The Day

Edith Windsor, 83, acknowledges her supporters as she leaves the Supreme Court on March 27, 2013. The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case ‘Edith Schlain Windsor, in Her Capacity as Executor of the Estate of Thea Clara Spyer, Petitioner v. United States,’ which challenges the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), the second case about same-sex marriage this week. By Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

Face Of The Day

(Photo: A butterfly lands on a girl in the ‘Sensational Butterflies’ exhibition at the Natural History Museum in London, England. The live, tropical butterfly house will be stationed on the Natural History Museum’s east lawn from March 29, 2013 until September 15, 2013. By Oli Scarff/Getty Images)

Faces Of The Day

Cathy Eliot of Silver Spring, Maryland, and her son Matthew Haris, 3, sled down a hill at Takoma Park Middle School as a wet and heavy snow falls March 25, 2013. An early-spring snow blanketed parts of the nation’s capital less than a week before the Easter holiday. By Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.