The New York Times

The New York Times is a major journalistic institution in The Navidson Record, appearing not as a participant in the house’s events but as part of the documentary’s surrounding apparatus of verification, criticism, and public memory. It supplies everyday background, publishes arguments about photographic truth, preserves the mystery of Delial, and becomes one measure against which Will Navidson’s images are judged. Through it, the record’s supernatural or impossible material is placed in tension with the ordinary mechanisms of modern news culture.

Presence in Everyday Life

The newspaper first appears within the domestic routine of the Navidson household. Morning brings orange juice, NPR, a dispute over the children’s sugared cereal, and The New York Times while Navidson handles his coffee and Karen scans the classifieds. The scene is deliberately mundane: the dishwasher moans, the toaster pops, and the paper becomes the surface on which a coffee spill finally spreads. Against that ordinary background, the house’s abnormality is not introduced through spectacle alone. It emerges beside familiar media, breakfast habits, and the small administrative texture of family life.

The coffee episode gives the newspaper a material role as well as a cultural one. Coffee rises above the rim of the cup without spilling, briefly held in an impossible-looking bulge, before the morning wake-up call wobbles and sends caffeine across the page. The result is a brown blot on a newspaper associated with public information and rational description. The domestic accident therefore places the paper at the boundary between the measurable world and the forces that exceed it: the page records a mundane consequence of a moment that briefly resembles a violation of physics.

Authority and Photographic Truth

The New York Times is also connected to the book’s sustained debate over whether photographic images can function as evidence. In a discussion of digital manipulation, Andy Grundberg’s 1990 article in the paper argues that readers will increasingly see news photographs as illustrations rather than reportage because they will no longer be able to distinguish genuine images from manipulated ones. Even when photographers and editors resist falsification, the credibility of reproduced images will be diminished by lowered expectations. The newspaper thus articulates the epistemological crisis that The Navidson Record dramatizes: the camera may preserve an image while no longer guaranteeing the reality behind it.

That crisis is intensified by the contrast between competing recording practices. Navidson’s own footage is remarkably steady, carefully framed, and aesthetically controlled, while Holloway Roberts’ tape is tilted, blurred, badly lit, and finally overwhelmed by danger; Karen and Tom Navidson’s recordings are similarly limited by inexperience. The New York Times belongs to the institutional world that normally evaluates such differences, yet the record makes technical polish unstable as a measure of truth. A beautifully composed image may reveal the impossible more powerfully, but it may also invite suspicion precisely because it is so controlled.

The newspaper’s position is consequently double. It represents the professional standards that seek to police documentary credibility, while its own cited discussions acknowledge that every photographic system can be compromised by editing, enhancement, or interpretation. The Navidson Record exploits that contradiction rather than resolving it. Its images appear to demand journalistic belief at the same moment that the culture of journalism has taught viewers to distrust any reproduced image.

Public Record and Delial

The New York Times also helps preserve the public history surrounding Delial, the name Navidson gave to the starving Sudanese child in his Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph. Before the release of The Navidson Record, Navidson’s friends, family, and colleagues did not know that Delial referred to that child. When questioned about the name, he answered evasively, saying that he forgot, that it concerned someone close to him, or that he wished to preserve a little mystery. The secrecy made the name appear personal and possibly romantic; Billy Reston admitted that he had imagined Delial as a mythological pin-up girl and had never connected the name with the photograph.

The record resolves that mystery by showing Karen’s image of the name written on the back of the print and including Navidson’s letter. The disclosure changes Delial from an enigmatic private reference into the human subject of an image that had already entered public circulation. The New York Times is part of that circulation: colleagues connected with the paper recognize the revelation as an explanation for the burden Navidson carried after making the photograph. Purdham Huckler of The New York Times considers the experience crushing, while Lindsay Gerknard identifies the professional and moral dilemma at its center: the photojournalist asks why an image was taken instead of an intervention being made.

The paper therefore stands at the intersection of recognition and exposure. It helped make Navidson’s photograph publicly consequential, but the later revelation forces the public to reconsider what such recognition costs the photographer and the photographed subject. The newspaper’s authority can document a career and preserve a controversy, yet it cannot remove the ethical wound created by turning suffering into an image.

Circulation, Reception, and the Impossible

The New York Times belongs to a broader network through which The Navidson Record acquires cultural legitimacy. The film did not initially appear as a complete documentary. It first circulated as The Five and a Half Minute Hallway, a short optical illusion accompanied by the claim that the events were true. No official distributor released it through festivals or commercial film circles; VHS copies passed from hand to hand, each dub degrading the home video while preserving the image of a bizarre house. The newspaper’s later presence contrasts with this informal circulation, marking the point at which a private or underground recording becomes an object of public inquiry.

That contrast matters because the record continually moves between household media and institutional media. The early shorts depend on copied videotapes and uncertain authorship, while later arguments invoke tax statements, grants, professional testimony, and journalism. The New York Times is not able to settle the film’s truth, but its involvement demonstrates that the question has escaped the household and entered public systems of evidence. The impossible hallway is therefore surrounded by ordinary documentary practices: duplication, reporting, criticism, archival citation, and financial calculation.

The institution’s interpretive reach also extends to the film’s ending. When Navidson’s descent leaves nearly six minutes of the screen black, critics dispute whether the sequence is an artistic provocation, a cinematic failure, or something beyond cinema. The darkness is accompanied by fragmented audio, including Navidson’s reports that he has no food or water, that his flash is dead, and that he is cold, followed later by his uncertainty about whether he is floating or falling. The New York Times’ broader concern with the credibility of images becomes especially relevant here, because the climax offers almost no image at all. What remains is sound, absence, and the viewer’s forced attempt to construct an event from incomplete media.

Narrative Significance

The New York Times represents the documentary world’s promise that events can be stabilized through publication, expertise, and public record. Yet every appearance also exposes the limits of that promise. The paper can frame a photograph, name a controversy, and register a critical argument, but it cannot make the impossible house legible or restore certainty to images whose reality has become doubtful.

Its role is therefore less that of a final judge than of a pressure point in the book’s argument about representation. The ordinary newspaper on the breakfast table, the article warning that photographs may lose their authority, and the paper’s connection to the Delial mystery all join private experience to public evidence. The New York Times gives The Navidson Record a recognizable social world, but the record ultimately turns that world’s standards of verification against themselves, leaving the reader with a document whose most decisive truth may appear as a black screen, a damaged recording, or a name finally read on the back of a photograph.