Rolling Stone and Sean Murphy: Looking for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's True Face: The New Yorker The uproar in Boston and elsewhere this week over the August 1st cover of Rolling Stone, which features a self-portrait of the alleged Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, used to promote an investigative report about his life leading up to the attack, had, for those who were angry about it, a built-in set of villains: the magazine and its editors and, by extension, Janet Reitman, the author of the story. On Thursday afternoon, critics of the magazine cover found their hero: the Massachusetts State Police Sergeant Sean Murphy, who has worked for twenty-five years as a "tactical photographer" for the department, and who delivered to Boston magazine never-before-released photos that he took of the manhunt for Tsarnaev. Murphy was not authorized to share the images - some have worried that their dissemination may compromise their use as evidence in Tsarnaev's trial - and on Thursday night Murphy was relieved of duty, at least temporarily, and ordered not to discuss his actions with the press. Boston magazine published a selection of Murphy's images on its Web site, in a post titled "The Real Face of Terror: Behind the Scenes Photos of the Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Manhunt." The leading image is stark and stunning: it shows Tsarnaev in a hooded sweatshirt, his bloodied face downcast and one hand raised in a gesture of surrender. On his forehead, right between his eyes, is the bright-red dot issuing from a rifle sight. In another picture, Tsarnaev looks injured and is lifting his shirt, with the light still on his head. In yet another, he appears slumped over, with his head on his arm. One shows E.M.T.s stabilizing him. These images, Murphy and Boston magazine argue, show the "real face" of Tsarnaev: "Defeated and barely alive," as John Wolfson writes in the post, "not the handsome, confident young man shown on the magazine cover." This distinction is as emotionally gratifying as it is nonsensical: all of the images that we've seen of Tsarnaev - little boy, baseball-hat-wearing bomber, goofy teen-ager, bloodied and defeated fugitive, fidgety and unwell-looking criminal defendant - are real. No one, not even a publicly despised nineteen-year-old, has just one true face. The image of Tsarnaev on Rolling Stone is as real as the picture of him in a sniper's sights - it is merely that we prefer the one in which he was brought to justice to the one in which he was free. In a statement given to Boston magazine, Murphy explained his motives for sharing the images: I believe that the image that was portrayed by Rolling Stone magazine was an insult to any person who has every worn a uniform of any color or any police organization or military branch, and the family members who have ever lost a loved one serving in the line of duty. The truth is that glamorizing the face of terror is not just insulting to the family members of those killed in the line of duty, it also could be an incentive to those who may be unstable to do something to get their face on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine. Many critics have charged that the Rolling Stone picture "glamorized" Tsarnaev. The shorthand argument is that the cover of Rolling Stone can be viewed as a public endorsement, and that it conveys a celebrity status onto Tsarnaev, which is hurtful to the people whom he is charged with killing, maiming, and terrorizing. Furthermore, the argument goes, the image itself, in which Tsarnaev has something of a rock-star look, only makes this connection more obvious and more dangerous. Murphy's photographs, meanwhile, have been widely hailed as an antidote to this type of glammed-out image of Tsarnaev - the real deal, scrubbed of sentiment and gloss, conveying nothing other than some kind of pure truth. Yet that argument assumes that everyone who views Murphy's photos will see them either as Murphy does - with the detachment of a professional photographer - or with anger mixed with the pulsing thrill of justice accomplished. Might there be other viewers out there? Certainly members of the #FreeDzhokhar club will have a different take. And so, too, could some angry young man, awed by the image of a near-peer held in sniper light, like some real-life game of Call of Duty, reminded of how a teen-ager was able to bring an American city to a relative standstill. Glamour is in the eye of the viewer. Context, as many have argued this week, does indeed matter - but context is an encompassing thing, bringing subject, photographer, publisher, and viewer into a shared and messy space. Of course, the speculation that Murphy's photos may be the "dangerous" ones is ultimately as flimsy as Murphy's assertion that the image of Tsarnaev on Rolling Stone might inspire a wave of homegrown Islamic terrorists to get to work building bombs in their bedrooms. None of these images are dangerous in any clear or sure way - they are simply different pictures of the same person, part of a growing visual record of a moment in history. Later in his statement, Murphy writes, Photography is very simple, it's very basic. It brings us back to the cave. An image like this on the cover of Rolling Stone, we see it instantly as being wrong. What Rolling Stone did was wrong. This guy is evil. This is the real Boston bomber. Not someone fluffed and buffed for the cover of Rolling Stone magazine. Murphy is an experienced photographer, and his opinions on the medium carry weight. Perhaps he thinks that the likes of Susan Sontag are simply full of it, and that photography is not an immensely complicated and fraught endeavor - that a single image cannot produce deep ambivalence in the viewer or mean many things at once. But even if we grant his argument that photography is "simple," we surely cannot second his other claims. Right and wrong, good and evil, and real and fake are not the same sure dichotomies as black and white. Now that they have become public documents, Murphy's photos deserve to be seen or ignored, based on the preferences of viewers, just like all the other images of Tsarnaev. Boston magazine has said that it will publish more of them in its upcoming September issue. No doubt CVS, Walgreens, and all the other stores that have refused to sell the August issue of Rolling Stone will be proud to stock it on their shelves. Photograph: Massachusetts State Police/Sean Murphy/AP.