On Monday morning, May 2, readers of The New York Times — and newspapers around the country — could pick up the latest editions to see the face of President Obama staring back at them from Page 1 with that quiet but steely resolve that had been evident the night before. It seemed a fitting record of his announcement that Osama bin Laden had been killed by American forces.

Only, it wasn’t.

It was, instead, a picture of Mr. Obama’s return to the lectern minutes after the announcement, to accommodate still photographers who needed a picture that looked just like the televised speech.

This practice, which has been in place at least as far back as the Nixon administration, keeps photographers out of the way of television cameras and teleprompters, prevents the noise of their cameras from interfering with presidential oratory and safeguards against the possibility that their jostling will distract the chief executive at some critical passage.

At the same time, it allows them to transmit pictures memorializing speeches they’re not permitted to cover.

As it turns out, however, the Bin Laden announcement may have been the last such post-op op.

The White House has decided to end the practice, Donald R. Winslow reported last week in “Obama White House: No More Photo Re-enactments,” on News Photographer, the magazine of the National Press Photographers Association. (Other accounts appeared on Poynter, The Huffington Post and The Washington Post.)

The decision comes — not at all by coincidence — after a blog post by Jason Reed of Reuters, one of the five news photographers who were under the White House roof on May 1 but not in the East Room when the president addressed the nation (“Ready to Record History,” May 2). Mr. Reed described the set up:

As President Obama continued his nine-minute address in front of just one main network camera, the photographers were held outside the room by staff and asked to remain completely silent. Once Obama was off the air, we were escorted in front of that teleprompter and the president then re-enacted the walk-out and first 30 seconds of the statement for us.

It seemed that while those in the know had long since taken these post-broadcast restagings for granted, those who didn’t know were surprised to learn that such a fiction was indulged at all.

“This has been going on for over 50 years,” said David Hume Kennerly, who has photographed presidents as a journalist and as the White House photographer during the Ford administration. “They were doing it for Nixon, Carter, Reagan. It’s not a scandal. It’s been going on forever. All the photographers put it clearly in their captions.”

Among the fundamental questions raised by the practice is whether a caption — no matter how explicit — can possibly overcome the natural tendency of readers to assume that a photograph of a president at a lectern or behind a desk was made while his words were being broadcast.

Mr. Winslow, for one, doesn’t think it can.

“No caption can make a fake picture real,” he said. “A fake picture is a fake picture. We already have a big enough problem getting a reader to believe us. Our credibility is all that we have. That trust — once broken — is never fully recovered.”

“Just because that’s the way it’s always been done doesn’t make it right,” he added. “It was wrong then. It’s wrong now.”

On May 2, The Times ran a one-column photograph taken by Pablo Martinez Monsivais of The Associated Press. The A.P. caption information said, “President Barack Obama reads his statement to photographers after making a televised statement on the death of Osama bin Laden from the East Room of the White House in Washington, Sunday, May 1, 2011.”

The caption in the newspaper said, “President Obama announced that Bin Laden was killed in a firefight earlier Sunday.”

Given all the other momentous news judgments that had to be made simultaneously that night on almost less than no notice, it seems almost unfair to quibble with a caption that is not literally wrong — though it scarcely dispels the idea that the picture isn’t a “live” shot of the speech.

“As the news editor who was in charge of the front page presentation that night, I am, even in hindsight, comfortable with the caption we ran under the circumstances,” Kyle Massey wrote in an e-mail on Monday. “I do not believe it misled readers in any fundamental way. However, knowing what I know now — that the photo was from a recap for the benefit of still photographers, a form of stagecraft that has been around for decades — I would have argued for a picture from the speech itself. So I welcome the White House’s decision to end the practice.”

Photographers, however, might well wonder whether the outcome will not be so benign. The decision may presage even less coverage of the White House than is now permitted.

“It’s going to do nothing but hurt our access,” said Doug Mills, a staff photographer at The Times who was also among the small group allowed to photograph the president on May 1. “They’ll just put one photographer in there. This is one step forward and four steps back.”

“There’s not a perfect solution,” he continued. “Everyone wants their own pictures: The A.P., The New York Times, Reuters. They don’t want a government handout or a pool photo.”

Not that everyone likes the arrangement that has been in place. Indeed, just about no one does.

“In my view, we’re forced to choose between bad alternatives: a lower-quality screen grab, or a better-quality picture that doesn’t depict the actual event,” said Philip B. Corbett, The Times’s associate managing editor for standards. He added, “I’m in favor of establishing a new protocol that won’t require these tradeoffs.”

As an insider for a brief period, Mr. Kennerly was able to photograph televised addresses by President Gerald R. Ford, including the 1974 announcement that he would pardon former President Richard M. Nixon. Asked how he managed to do so, Mr. Kennerly said, “Very quietly.” Leicas helped, he said.

“No photographer thought shooting afterwards was a good idea,” Mr. Kennerly said. “Over the years, we always asked the White House to photograph during the speeches. But they always said no. It always seemed silly to me — to be honest — but we did it anyway.”

Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

Steve Liss, who has shot 43 covers for Time magazine, recalled photographing George W. Bush in December 2000 making his first address to the nation as president-elect, after the Supreme Court brought an end to the recount of the Florida vote, thus assuring his victory.

“They had the whole pool in there and we just stood to either side of the TV cameras and shot the picture,” he said. “It wasn’t rocket science. They just asked us to be as quiet as we can. I think we didn’t use motor drives or continuous frame, but we were in the room, standing right next to the live television cameras, when Bush declared he was president of the United States.

“If the president of the United States can’t speak live with cameras in the room,” Mr. Liss added, “then maybe he should find another occupation.”

While neither apologizing for nor excusing the practice, Mr. Mills explained it. “It’s a television moment,” he said. “It’s absurd to think we could stand in there and photograph and get the same angle as TV.” And that, Mr. Mills said, is the angle publications want. “If you don’t give photo editors what they saw on TV, you might as well throw them in the trash.”

As the photo representative to the White House Correspondents’ Association, Mr. Mills has broached the subject of equipping still cameras with soundproof blimps. But he said that White House staff members feared that their presence could be a distraction.

Still, the fact that two presidential photographers — Pete Souza and Chuck Kennedy — actually did cover the Bin Laden announcement would seem to show there’s room for some kind of accommodation. You don’t remember hearing any shutters click that night, do you?