[skippy the wonder dog]

There is always this debate around war photography appealing to ghoulishness, but sports injury photos make me think: at least war photography has an important subject....

My Grandfather, who deify's Churchill and Man U equally, would disagree with you.

You can argue that sports are important, but there's no utilitarian argument for publishing a series of photos depicting a terrible sports injury. There is, however, a utilitarian argument for publishing photos of casualties of war.

When those photos hit the newspaper pages, though, reader reaction against graphic war photos is always very strong. Witness the recent Grope & Flail reader comments reacting to the Canadian winner of the World Press Photo prize this year (although that was a photo of famine victims, not combat casualties); it was universally negative, suggesting that the photographer was immoral (or amoral). I don't see any similar reaction to graphic sports injury photos.

This is a little curious, I think. In this example, isn't publishing three photos of this injury, including a closeup, somewhat gratuitous? There's no story told by that sequence, i.e. you can't learn how the injury occurred, etc. It's just three views of the same thing. You would never see any newspaper or media website publish a series of three photos of a man with a gunshot wound lying on the ground, for example.