The Ethics Of Photo-Cropping

Newsweek editors excised the left two-thirds of the above image and captioned it:

"'I am.' Dick Cheney on Fox News Sunday, in response to the question, 'So even these cases where [C.I.A. interrogators] went beyond the specific legal authorization, you're O.K. with it?'"

Getty photographer David Hume Kennerly, who captured the shot, protests:

By linking that photo with Mr. Cheney’s comment and giving it such prominence, [Newsweek] implied something sinister, macabre, or even evil was going on there. [The magazine's] objective in running the cropped version was to illustrate its editorial point of view, which could only have been done by shifting the content of the image so that readers just saw what the editors wanted them to see. This radical alteration is photo fakery. Newsweek’s choice to run my picture as a political cartoon not only embarrassed and humiliated me and ridiculed the subject of the picture, but it ultimately denigrated my profession.

Kottke disagrees:

This is hardly photo fakery. Crops aren't lies. Full-frame photos aren't the truth. Kennerley himself could have easily taken that exact picture in the moment. A spokesman for Newsweek defended the magazine's action:

Yes, the picture has been cropped, an accepted practice of photographers, editors and designers since the invention of the medium. We cropped the photograph using editorial judgment to show the most interesting part of it. Is it a picture of the former vice president cutting meat? Yes, it is. Has it been altered? No. Did we use the image to make an editorial point -- in this case, about the former vice president's red-blooded, steak-eating, full-throated defense of his views and values? Yes, we did.

Given Cheney's reputation, the cropped photo of him is not an outlandish or biased depiction of the man...in fact, it's a pretty good visual metaphor of the former VP. If there's one thing that both Cheney's supporters and detractors can agree on, it's that he's a "red-blooded, steak-eating, full-throated [defender] of his views and values".

Kennerly responds to Newsweek here. We fall somewhere between these two commenters:

[I]t does seem like it is the same as quoting someone out of context… which also happens frequently in media. And, as far as photo manipulation goes, fairly small compared to the other photo manipulations. In the cropped image, you can tell he is at a home in a kitchen and that other people are there. It doesn’t take a huge jump of imagination to figure out what is going on. Poor taste? Yes. But, far from unreasonable.

What’s the big deal? Could anyone really think that the photo shows something “evil” going on in the Cheneys’ kitchen? Lighten up!