The Week in Pictures: March 29 - April 5

Slideshow: The Week in Pictures

Ammar Awad / Reuters

A Palestinian protester gets blasted with pepper spray, a Texas twister hits Dallas, the Kentucky Wildcats celebrate their basketball championship, lawmakers celebrate the end of another legislative session in Georgia and more.

Launch slideshow

By Robert Hood

We generally resist including more than one photograph from a news event in The Week in Pictures. That has something to do with the idea that we’re attempting to show images from the whole world each week. I realize that is laughably impossible. There is no way to show it all. Our goal is a little like navigating via the North Star. You know you’ll never get there, but it’s a good guide.

So, when we include more than one picture from an event we’re recognizing its importance, as we did this week with pictures from the tornados in Texas. The three picture sequence begins with an image pulled from video. It shows a semi-trailer being flung hundreds of feet into the air. Watch the video on that slideshow page. It’s incredible. The second tornado picture is Tom Pennington’s photo of a young couple sitting among the wreckage of their destroyed home. I’m attracted to this photo not because it shows strength, but because it shows love. It’s an example of how we cling to each other during the worst of times. We end the sequence with Khampha Bouaphanh’s wide view of the storm damage in a Lancaster, Texas neighborhood. The awful randomness of the path of destruction makes me wonder. It’s incredible that no one was killed in this storm.

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The storm photos are incredible, but the image I’ll remember from this week is Stew Milne’s photo of Nicholas Weichel attending his father’s funeral. Nicholas’ dad is the Rhode Island National Guardsman who was killed while saving a child in Afghanistan. During my time as a news photographer I’ve had to cover a few funerals. It’s so difficult. You have to put your emotonal reactions aside and somehow make publishable pictures. It’s probably one of the most difficult assignments a photographer can get. Milne’s photo is a sensitive portrayal of a son’s loss without being intrusive.

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Previous episodes of The Week in Pictures from 2012