The New Magazine

Editor Deb Leithauser offers insight into The Washington Post Magazine's new features.
Q&A: Ask the Editors

Sunday Crossword

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Second Glance

Spot the differences between two seemingly identical images

Washington Post photographer Bill O'Leary has always liked pigeons. He thinks of them as comical, with their portly builds, and he likes the patterns they form - lined up on telephone wires, the lips of buildings, the shoulders of statues. Where others see pigeons as rats with wings, O'Leary sees them as rather noble creatures. But then, he's used to thinking in visual terms. He appreciates, for example, the monochromatic effect of gray pigeons on gray buildings. When he's on assignment, he frequently shows up early, and as he's waiting for someone to emerge from a courthouse, say, or show up at an outside podium, he often trains his lens on the ever-present birds. It was in Adams Morgan that he noticed a group of pigeons at the same time he heard a jet airliner circling overhead. "There are two kinds of flight going on," he remembers thinking. "I'll draw some kind of parallel." The appearance of a plane and bird racing each other? A pigeon about to seize the plane in its claws? He wasn't sure what was possible, but he fired off as many pictures as he could. He captured the perfect apex - a pigeon flying with the speed of a plane. But he says what he really caught was "a happy coincidence."
- David Rowell