Inspired by artist Laura Fields and critic John Berger, Mark Kingsley has a fascinating meditation (with many examples) over at Speak Up on the “collision” between advertising and news images. It’s a collision exemplified by Page A3 of The New York Times, where there’s usually a fairly in-depth international piece and a photograph. Combine that with the ubiquitous Tiffany’s ad in its traditional upper-right spot, and you get a juxtaposition that often creates an entirely new narrative about society, art, economics, politics and culture.

My early exposure to this “way of seeing” was first viewing the [“Ways of Seeing”] BBC series as a freshman in college, and then as a junior designer in New York. Even though they didn’t speak the language of intertextuality, the art directors above me often would tweak layouts whether one image was “looking” at an image across from it or not. And from that moment on, inspired, I began collecting magazine covers based on their overall narrative effect.

So ever since seeing Child’s Play, I’ve looked at page three of the New York Times differently: always looking for a correspondence between the narratives of news photo and Tiffany ad, a correspondence between text and image, or simply a correspondence of shapes.