Before talking about images, talk about reality. One person is dead, two others are critically injured, and American political life is more dangerous today than it was yesterday. Former president Donald Trump was wounded in the right ear and will recover; the body politic was wounded far more deeply, and the prognosis isn’t clear. We don’t yet know the motivation of the shooter, but it seems the threshold between violent rhetoric and violent action has been breached once again, and every time it is crossed, the crossing gets easier.

There is another reality added to all of that: Evan Vucci’s photograph for the Associated Press of Trump in the immediate aftermath of a shooting at a Pennsylvania political rally. Trump is seen with blood on his face, his right arm raised to pump a fist at the crowd while the American flag streams above his head. Independent of how this photograph is read and interpreted, it is strongly constructed, with aggressive angles that reflect the chaos and drama of the moment, and a powerful balance of color, all red, white and blue, including the azure sky above and the red-and-white decorative banner below. Trump seems to emerge from within a deconstructed version of its basic colors.

It is a photograph that could change America forever.

It has the concentrated power that the Zapruder film of John F. Kennedy’s 1963 assassination lacks, and its impact on the fate of American politics probably transcends the infamous 1988 image of then-candidate Michael Dukakis in a tank, which changed only the course of a single political campaign. It emerged all but simultaneously with the event, spreading faster and further than any similar image from the analog age. And its symbolic meaning arrived at the same moment as its literal content, without a moment to think.

Vucci’s photo will create a reality more real than reality, transforming the chaos and messiness of a few moments of peril onstage in Pennsylvania into a surpassing icon of Trump’s courage, resolve and heroism. Densely packed with markers of nationalism and authority — the flag, the blood, the urgent faces of federal agents in dark suits — it will encourage some of the darkest forces in American civic life. People who preach violence, who revel in its political potential, can now say that one of their own is a victim, and he was. From that, more cycles of violence are almost inevitable.

Political violence can only degrade democracy, never advance it, and this photograph is painful proof of that corrosive power. Violence creates victims who must be avenged, and it very often strengthens the power of the people it targets, making heroes of them if they survive and martyrs if the violence achieves its terrible ends.

Vucci’s photograph distills and refines the basic themes of Trump’s political career into a single, explosive image. America is a dangerous place, and this image confirms that. Trump speaks often about how no politician “has been treated worse or more unfairly” than he has. Those wounds are now made real and visible. If blood alone is a sign of service, he has served.

He can now literally wave the bloody shirt, a phrase that recalls the sanguinary political rhetoric that followed the worst political violence in American history, the Civil War and the South’s resistance to Reconstruction. Blood is essential to Trump’s rhetoric, with its contrast between red-blooded patriots and the polluted blood of outsiders, or immigrants. The former species of blood, the right kind, the one he shares with his followers, is now visible, and all its symbolic power instantiated in the image of Trump raising his fist to the crowd.

Almost from the beginning of photography, the medium has been entwined metaphorically and actually with violence. We say we shoot photographs like we shoot a gun, though photographers do not always prefer the analogy. Photographs give us power; guns give us power. The camera is reflexively drawn to scenes of violence, and photographs freeze those moments, often killing our ability to analyze them dispassionately.

Vucci had an instant to make his image, and in that instant, that frenzied moment after a moment of real violence, new violence was done. The image is so powerful that it will make it difficult or impossible for millions of Americans to sort the reality of Trump, the sum total of his lifetime, from an image violently crafted in a moment, authored by a man with a gun and fixed in the memory by a man with a camera.

Moments after Trump was grazed on his right ear, and just as the Secret Service was about to whisk him offstage, he appears to have said, “Let me get my shoes.” Then he said “Wait, wait,” and made himself visible through the bodily phalanx of agents working to protect him, pumping his fist to the crowd. He appears to chant, “Fight, fight.”

One can say two things of this moment: His devotion to his crowd is unshakable; his devotion to the camera is also absolute. It wasn’t a wise thing to do, given that he couldn’t be sure there was only one shooter in the crowd. At that moment, when he asked for a little more time with his people, the agents protecting him were also in danger. But it revealed Trump’s ultimate survival instinct — always look strong — with blinding clarity.

Another image, made shortly after Trump was hustled from the stage, is haunting. Washington Post photographer Jabin Botsford captured a single shoe onstage, perhaps Trump’s, given that he can be heard on the still-open microphone asking for his shoes after the shooting. Shoes are bound up with their own rich stew of analogies and symbols, closely connected to death, as in devastating images of piles of shoes left behind by victims of the Nazi death camps. But they are also symbols of empathy, as in learning to walk in another person’s shoes. An abandoned shoe is deeply ambivalent in its resonance, standing for something unfinished, or all too finished.

What authorities are investigating as an assassination attempt was for Trump a near-death experience, and it should never have happened. The event, and the image, will bond the former president even closer to his supporters, who will find embodied in it everything they have sought from their leader: proof of his resilience, evidence of courage, even perhaps some of the godlike powers that are imputed to him in the popular memes that show him with an Olympian physique, bristling with power and vigor.

Near-death experiences, especially if they’re violent, change people. Some are transformed, returned to life with new appreciation for its fragility, reanimated with gratitude, love and the power of forgiveness. Others turn bitter, angry and resolute. We don’t know how this will change Trump, whether he will be the same man he was Saturday, or a new one. As always, we watch him as we watch the television, movies or videos on social media. What’s next, and what now?

For many Americans, the horror and gravity of Saturday night’s shooting at a rally for Donald Trump in Pennsylvania was quickly brought home by an image: the former president, blood streaking down his face, raising his fist in defiance.

One of the most widely shared photos was captured by Associated Press chief photographer Evan Vucci. It was one of several taken in the aftermath of the shooting that are sure to go down in the pantheon of American photography.

“The pinnacle of photojournalism. A perfectly framed and composed image of historic breaking news,” New York Times journalist Matina Stevis-Gridneff wrote on X of Vucci’s photo.

As Trump began to speak on Saturday, four newsroom photographers had been arranged around the stage in an area known as the buffer, which was only five or 10 feet from the president. When the shooting began, the photographers scrambled to get to a better position to capture the chaos, potentially putting themselves in the line of fire in the process.

According to the photographers, the Trump team normally gives the pool of photographers about five minutes at the start of every campaign speech to take photos; in this case, because the shooting happened near the beginning of the event, the photographers were able to capture it from up close.

Vucci was on the left side of the stage and ran to where he thought Trump would exit after the shooting began, along with other photographers.

“The only thing I kept telling myself was: ‘Slow down. Slow down. Compose. Slow down.’” he said. “I knew I had to get this. This was such an important moment in American history. It needed to be documented. If you’re not keeping a level head, you can’t do the job.”

Vucci, a 20-year veteran of the wire service, said he wasn’t scared — even as some campaign staffers worried about a possible second shooter. “I never thought about it for a second,” he said. “I have to be there. I can’t hide. I can’t duck behind the stage. I have to do my job.”

Jabin Botsford, a photographer for The Washington Post, was moving from the back of the stage to the front when the shooting began.

“I heard the first pop, and I was like: ‘Oh, weird. Fireworks,’” he said. “It was super scary. Nobody knew what was going on. The president fell to the ground, and I was going to make a picture of it even though the staff was like, ‘You guys need to get down.’”

Botsford was also able to take a video of the aftermath because he was wearing Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses that can take 30-second videos, which he “somehow” remembered to turn on.

Times photographer Doug Mills was able to capture what appears to be the stream of the bullet in the air, as it whizzed by Trump’s head. Former Associated Press photographer Haraz N. Ghanbari called it “a remarkable photo.”

Mills, in an interview with the Times, said the pool photographers “were all jostling around in there trying to get our normal pictures,” until he heard what he thought was a popping noise made by a car. Trump “went down behind the lectern, and I thought, ‘Oh my God, something’s happened.’”

While he scrambled to get a better shot, Mills said he feared for his life. “At first I thought right away, ‘Could I be shot?’ It was scary. I’ve never been in a more horrific scene.”

Getty staff photographer Anna Moneymaker was able to capture Trump on the stage, seemingly taken between the legs of an officer.

The photographers received widespread praise for their work, particularly amid a violent and chaotic situation. “Their iconic photographs were immediately seen around the world and will be added to the indelible visual record of history,” said Jessica Koscielniak, president of the White House News Photographers Association. “Yesterday’s event only reinforces the critical importance and need for visual journalists to be present and in close proximity to candidates and elected officials.”

After the shooting, the photographers went to a holding tent for about 30 minutes, Mills said. They emerged to take pictures of the emptied field and the items that remained, including cellphones and a motorized wheelchair.

“We just walked into total emptiness,” Botsford said.

Vucci was among the photographers at the Associated Press who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2021 for coverage of the protests that followed the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. He has also photographed combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, an experience he said helped him remain calm and composed.

“My job as a photographer is to just show the viewer, though my eyes, the world in front of me,” he said. “I felt like all of us did that.”

Botsford, like Vucci, got little time to rest or reflect on what happened Saturday.

“I’m still trying to process it all,” he said from his hotel in Milwaukee on Sunday. “There’s a lot going on in my head. It’s still, like, disbelief.”