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photography

The Story Behind That Photograph

You know the one: a hand wrapped around a grubby straight-sided pint glass, its contents (London Pride? John Smith’s?) being tipped into the mouth of an anonymous male drinker.

News editors love it, or at least rely on it — here, here, here and here, to point to just a few examples — for illustrating stories about alcohol, negative or positive, regardless of their specific content.

As a result, for some commentators, its repeated usage has become a symbol of  the problem with mass media’s approach to beer:

For our part, we’ve become more fascinated with each repetition. Are there really no other pictures of beer in the stock libraries? Or, as some have suggested, are editors now just using it to troll grumpy beer geeks? And — because we always ask this question eventually — what is the story behind the picture?