Today’s Lens blog at the New York Times Web site features a post by photojournalist David Hume Kennerly excoriating Newsweek’s crop of a photo he took in Dick Cheney’s kitchen. The cropped photo (right), used to illustrate a quote from Cheney saying that he would be ok with CIA interrogation tactics going beyond legal boundaries,  drastically changed the focus and feel of the original image. Kennerly pulled no punches about his reaction:

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.

I do think there are some ethical issues with the way Newsweek used the photo, but not because of the cropping. My problem with it is that

1. it’s a very forced union between the photo and the editorial content, and
2. the use of the photo implies something much more sinister than what the actual editorial content says (an issue of the presentation not fitting the content). Even though anyone who spends more than a few seconds looking at the picture will realize Cheney is just carving steak, the blood still plants a very negative image in their head. Newsweek’s VP of communications defended the photo usage as making a point about “the former vice president’s red-blooded, steak-eating, full-throated defense of his views and values”, but that strikes me as a very weak and dubious explanation. When you look at that package, you are much more likely to think “butcher” than “red-blooded” or “full-throated”, and I suspect that’s what the Newsweek editors wanted, even though the quote from Cheney hardly would make anyone think “butcher”.

However, unlike Kennerly, I don’t really have a problem with the fact that the original photo was drastically cropped. I can see where he is coming from: He took a photo that he felt told a story or chronicled a moment of history, and the crop does change the tone of the story. However, where he and I diverge on the subject is when he calls the crop “photo fakery”.

Why is the cropped image considered “fakery” while the original photo is considered authentic? The original photo, after all, is just another crop. It captures everything within a certain frame and discards everything outside that frame. Whether this is done in the camera’s viewfinder or on a computer screen is irrelevant. Who knows, something that didn’t make it into the original photo — a picture hanging on the wall, perhaps — could have totally altered the feel of the scene. Or look at it this way: What if the photographer also snapped a closeup of Cheney carving steak? Would that be considered fakery since we know there were other elements in that scene in that moment but they weren’t included in the photo?

While we’re on the subject of reality, here’s something that has always bugged me about the idea that an untouched photo tells an authentic story: A photo captures but a split second in time, which in many cases does not actually tell you what happened. The example that always pops into my mind is something like this: Let say you see a picture of a running back out in front of a couple of defenders. From the picture, it looks like the running back is doing well since he’s eluding the tacklers. But what really happened? He could have been pummeled a split second later by a guy who wasn’t in the frame when the photographer pressed the shutter. Or this scene could have taken place 20 yards behind the line of scrimmage, after the running back really, really screwed up, and he could have ended up being tackled for a big loss. But you can’t tell that from the picture, cropped or not. A photo, by its very nature, lifts something or some moment out of context and elevates it above all the other elements in that particular scene or above all the other moments that immediately preceded or followed it and says, “This is what happened.”

The end or the beginning?

I think this case also underscores the difference in the way photographers and designers perceive a photo. To a photographer, the photo he or she submits is a finished product, the end result of meticulous work, planning, and editing. As such, only minimal, if any, editing should be done to it. To a designer, however, the photo is not the end, but the beginning — just one of the pieces of raw material waiting to be molded into a coherent package. In that light, cropping a photo is no more an ethical breach than rewriting a headline to fit a story. If the headline you had written before doesn’t fit the tone of the story, you change it to fit. And so it is with the photo. It’s easy to see the conflict inherent in that situation. When I was designing newspapers, as much as I could, I tried to preserve the photographer’s vision, just as a good editor tries to preserve a writer’s voice in a story. However, if a photographer takes a photo for an editorial package, he/she should understand and accept the fact that what they submit is but one piece of the puzzle and by no means a finished product. That’s a fact of life, and there’s not much to say about that except “Deal with it.”

Then there are times when the story that a photographer sees through the lens on assignment is completely different from the story the writer tells. I think we should distinguish between photos taken as standalones or for a photo story and photos taken with the expressed intent of accompanying a written story. In the former, I would lean toward giving more weight to the photographer’s vision, whereas in the latter I would be more inclined to go with the writer’s. It also underscores the need for photographers, editors, writers, and designers to communicate with each other BEFORE the photoshoot so that they are all on the same page about what story they’re telling.

Another, more practical, reason for drastic cropping that I’ve come across is simply a built-in limitation of print — the need to fit the content into certain fixed dimensions (though that’s pretty obviously not the reason behind Newsweek’s cropping of this photo). This is a horrible reason to crop a photo, but it is also an unavoidable need, although good, advanced planning will cut down on this.

In my time as a newspaper designer, I saw egregious crops that butchered a good photo simply to fit a predetermined hole, and I also saw instances where a photographer was leaning over a designer’s shoulder, complaining about the smallest of crops. As much as I could, I tried to preserve the photographer’s vision for the photo, unless it was something that completely ran counter to the tone of the story. However, at the end of the day, my No. 1 obligation was always to the overall tone of the entire presentation — story, photo, display type, graphics.  If a dramatic crop of a photo contributed to achieving that aim, I would have no qualms about doing it. The photo was not the end in itself, but one of the means to an end.