Flipping off
Ken Otterbourg at the Winston-Salem Journal writes about a not uncommon occurrence at newspapers: Photo subjects messing with you.
We've had high school students give us fake names to go into captions or, worse, give us a real name of one of their pals as a prank on us and their friend. Those are hard to prevent short of demanding a photo ID of everyone in a photograph.
I don't recall a photo we took with someone inconspicuously or inadvertently giving the camera the finger, but I've seen it in other photographs. Otterbourg tells of a picture they published that inspired one reader to complain about the coarse gesture. (Unfortunately, Otterbourg printed the letter from the reader verbatim, an action with no discernible purpose except to embarrass the writer.)
I'll end as he has: You be the editor. Would you have run the photograph?