re: #48 CDRealist

I dunno. From an editor’s point of view, you want to crop to the subject, which is the guy, a smidgen below his knee and above his elbow. The guy’s face stands out more in the second photo. The rest is bland, but he is dynamic. It’s a better picture for a newspaper.

And the photo editor may not even have known it was a knife. When I first saw it, I thought it was a gun barrel hanging down. When I saw the comments, I looked again, and yes, it’s a knife. In general, convenience or stupidity are more likely reasons for error than bad faith, even in a press agency.

If the photo editor thought it was a fucking gun barrel, that would make the cropping even more suspicious, wouldn’t you say?

And the soldier is lying there with a bleeding wound to his groin. Where do you think that wound came from? A knife, perhaps?

And the cropping was done so the knife is just barely cut out of the picture. If the editor wanted a really dramatic shot, he would have cropped it in nearly the same way, but included the knife, to emphasize the potential connection between it and the wound.

Not doing so is about the best prima facie evidence of bad faith and an agenda that you could want, short of a statement by the editor.