Steve Bowbrick notices how the headshots on the cover of the new book Bad Men: Guantanamo Bay and the Secret Prisons leave a large gap between Osama Bin Laden and Bush/Blair.
I’m going to make a small bet that the first version of the cover spaced Bin-Laden, Bush and Blair evenly across the top of the pocket but that everyone at the meeting objected to it. I can imagine the discomfort it would have produced in the studio.
People wouldn’t have been able to place it to begin with but they’d all have felt the relief once that little gap was opened up. Even spacing may have been neater but it suggested equivalence. Grouping Bush and Blair together does enough to defuse that and neutralise the queasy feeling I’m sure the original produced. The message now is: “they’re all bad but one of them is really bad”.