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A tweet by BBC journalist Roland
Hughes, describing the photo as ‘like a
beautiful painting’, has now been
‘liked’ and retweeted almost 60,000
times.
The photo was first published by the
Manchester Evening News, which has
stayed close to the story. The
newspaper even tracked down the
woman in the red dress, Hannah Kirby,
who set the record straight about the
man in the blue suit. ‘He wasn’t
casually chilling and reaching for his
beer!’ she revealed. ‘There was a bit of
commotion went on and he was
knocked over but managed to save his
bottle of beer.’
Ms Kirby said she knew both the men
in the photo. Of the man seemingly
being restrained by police, she told the
newspaper, ‘He didn’t get arrested, he
was fine in the end.’
Aside from the general debauchery,
commentators were quick to point out
more minor visual elements that added
to the mise-en-scène. The man being
restrained lies parallel to the painted
yellow lines; Ms Kirby’s hand is
offered in a ‘gesture of supplication’
that is ‘a well-known trope of classical
art’; and the blue-suited man ‘clutches
valiantly for his fallen sword’ (the beer
bottle), according to analysis by the
Evening News.
The newspaper noted the photograph
had been ‘used by newspapers,
websites and broadcasters as far away
as Australia’. The photographer said
that documenting the night-time
economy as it actually is – rather than
through staged snaps of socialites at
parties – was an important part of
covering the life of a city.
‘Mostly, a shot like that is just about
being in the right place at the right
time,’ he said. ‘I just happened to be in
the right spot.’
So forceful was the reaction that the
BBC’s Hughes, who discovered the
picture buried in a NYE photo gallery
on the Evening News website, wrote a
first-person piece describing what it
was like to start a viral trend.
Manchester’s police department
weighed in, tweeting that the photo
showed ‘just a normal night for cops,
captured brilliantly’. And some Twitter
users had fun comparing the photo to
famous artworks, or using applications
such as Waterlogue to transform it into
a watercolour painting.
Michael Koziol,
Sydney Morning Herald
(2/1/16)