WHO KNOWS WHAT EVIL LURKS IN THE HEARTS OF MEN?

It’s St. Patrick’s Day, so naturally there was a Friends of Ireland gathering in Washington D.C. a few days ago.  Attendees included prominent politicians, including our German-American president and our Italian-American Speaker of the House.  There was nothing remarkable about any of that.  It was just retail politics in the good old USA.

But at this otherwise uneventful event, photographer Olivier Douliery snapped a picture that is fraught with symbolism.  An unsuspecting woman is menaced by a sinister figure, visible to the audience only by his shadow. 

I’ve seen both color and black & white versions of the photo.  The B&W version of the photo could be a production still from a classic black & white horror film, e.g. Val Lewton’s 1942 classic I Walked With A Zombie or F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent vampire film, Nosferatu. 

Or it could be an illustration for a new edition of T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” – “Between the idea and the reality, between the motion and the act, falls the shadow.”

Which image is scarier? I report, you decide.