What did you find to be the strongest imagery over the past few days? News? Your friends on Twitter?

Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter ordered that all public transportation and city offices be closed Monday and Tuesday.

William Thomas Cain / Getty Images

Empty streets in Atlantic City, N.J., on Monday.

Stan Honda / AFP/Getty Images

Balloons lie on the side of a closed New York City street Monday.

Andrew Burton / Getty Images

A man walks down a seemingly empty boardwalk as Hurricane Sandy approaches on Sunday in Atlantic City, N.J.

Mark Wilson / Getty Images

The floor of the New York Stock Exchange is empty of traders and remained closed Tuesday. The Stock Exchange said that no damage has occurred and that contingency plans are being tested only as a safety measure.

Richard Drew / AP

Balloons lie on the side of the closed New York City streets on Monday.

Andrew Burton / Getty Images

A composite of two photos of the Brooklyn Bridge, which remains closed to traffic on Tuesday (left) but open to pedestrians (right).

Spencer Platt / Getty Images

In bracing for Sandy, the East Coast effectively shut down. For the most part, that was a good decision: We've seen an abundance of photos showing devastation brought by flooding and heavy winds — and the damage is very real. Those photos — the ones with sunken cars and high water levels — are effective because they relay the message quite literally.

But there's also the coverage that seems less literal. Media photographers expecting a major disaster Monday, for example, attempted to relay feelings of anxiety that were rippling across the East Coast.

Those living on the East Coast know how eerie it feels to see an empty New York street during rush hour. That never happens. So here are a few photos from yesterday and today that evoke that sensation of desolation.

Here's the thing: A strategically captured photo of an empty Brooklyn Bridge conjures up feelings of loss and desolation. But a photo taken a few seconds later — of runners continuing their daily routine across the bridge — conveys signs of recovery and even normalcy. Same place, same situation — but with minor adjustments to detail, entirely different meanings emerge.

As Erroll Morris puts it: "You can never see the absence of something in a photograph. And isn't there always an elephant just outside the frame? A photograph decontextulizes everything. You see this swatch of reality that has
been torn out of the fabric of the world. And the only way we can know
what we're looking at is to investigate."

So what do you think? What did you find to be the strongest imagery over the past few days? News? Your friends on Twitter?

Copyright 2013 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Filed in:

• Photography
• Home Page Top Stories