Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The photo was taken by David Chidley of the Canadian Press outside the Dirksen Building last July as Black arrived for a day of the trial that led to him serving six and a half years in a Florida prison for fraud and obstruction of justice. No, it’s not a remarkable picture, and unless we take eyewitness testimony into account we can’t even be certain that Black wasn’t making some other sort of gesture. Where are the curled upper lip and mob boss scowl that normally accompany a first-rate mimed obscenity?
The worst that can be said about the winning photo is that despite what it shows, it’s false to Black. Susan Berger, a Chicago journalist who maintains a a blog on Black and who alerted me to the win, observed in e-mail that for the most part “Conrad was totally a gentleman who actually enjoyed talking to the press. (I remember many times when his daughter Alana would just touch his arm and give him a look to get him to stop talking to us.) It was like his daughter and wife kept him in check. There is some irony that this photo won an award because it was truly not a depiction of his behavior during the trial but rather just one day when he lost it.”
