Will Smith vs Chris Rock is a story told in one perfect photograph

The image is so captivating, it looks, ironically, like a still from a movie, writes David Harding

Tuesday 29 March 2022 21:30 BST

Will Smith slapping Chris Rock in public was always going to be a major story (AFP/Getty)

Despite the thousands of words, discussions and takes on the Will Smith and Chris Rock slap, one crucial role may have been overlooked – that of the photographers.

Smith slapping Rock in public was always going to be a major story, despite its ultimate triviality. The fact that Smith inexplicably chose to lash out at the world’s most famous awards ceremony multiplied the story’s impact a hundredfold. Even at such a grim moment for world news, the story was massive, and rightly so, despite some sniffiness that it did not merit the importance it was given at a time of war.

Regardless, Smith and Rock is a story people will talk about and reference for some time. It may even end up defining Smith’s career, an asterisk of shame against all his achievements.

And what will make it endure is not the column inches, or the “crucial” views of opinion writers, but, rather, the amazing image of the moment Smith slapped Rock.

The act itself was dramatic, and breathtakingly unreal. It was almost unbelievable, as if it had been staged – this was Hollywood, after all. The image is so captivating, it looks, ironically, like a still from a movie.

Without glorifying violence, there is an aesthetic to Smith’s wide-armed, tuxedoed slap, and Rock’s astonished look as he suffers the impact, that makes the enormity of what just happened even more amazing. We are all in shock at the same time.

If that picture didn’t exist, some may have doubted it had happened at all, because it seemed so implausible. That is the beauty of such an image, and shows the skill of those who took it.

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The incident will be replayed over and over, will be used for a thousand memes, and will top every list of “crazy things that happened at the Oscars”, but even in the age of video, it will be defined by the original image.

Two millionaires clashing on an LA stage as if they are standing outside a provincial nightclub on a Saturday night – expensive outfits notwithstanding – is not the most important of events. It is trivial in the grand scheme of things.

But one thing it will share with, say, the tank man in Tiananmen, striking miners at Orgreave, the falling man of 9/11 or the Tommie Smith Black Power salute is that the story can be told simply by using just one image.

And that is the work of a great photographer.

Yours,