Photo cropping
Choosing the edges of a photograph so that what lies outside them cannot contradict what lies inside: the empty half of the square, the photographer beside the victim, the handler beside the leader.
Every photograph is a crop of the world, and the audience knows this in principle and forgets it in practice. A frame that ends at the edge of the crowd says "crowd"; the same frame a foot wider says "a crowd in an empty square." Nothing in the picture is altered, which is why the device survives scrutiny that would catch retouching: the pixels are all genuine, and the lie is in what was left out.
Cropping is the visual form of Half Truth and the cheapest of the photographic devices, requiring only a decision. Exploits Availability Heuristic and Anchoring.
Historical examples
After the inauguration, the National Park Service's official photographs of the crowd on the Mall were cropped at the request of the White House to remove the empty space where the crowd ended, according to the Interior Department inspector general's documents released under the Freedom of Information Act. The pictures were not altered; their edges were.
Swaine, Jon. "Trump inauguration crowd photos were edited after he intervened." The Guardian, 6 September 2018; US Department of the Interior, Office of Inspector General, case file released 2018.
Nick Ut's photograph of Phan Thi Kim Phúc running from a napalm strike was cropped by the Associated Press for publication to remove a photographer at the right edge reloading his camera. The crop made the picture a scene of children alone; the full frame shows the press at work beside them.
Chong, Denise. The Girl in the Picture. New York: Viking, 2000; Associated Press, "Nick Ut and the photo that changed the war," 2012.
Photographs of forty world leaders "leading" the march after the Charlie Hebdo killings were framed tightly on the front row; wider frames and television footage showed the leaders in a guarded side street, with the public march elsewhere. Several papers ran the tight crop with captions placing the leaders at the head of the crowd.
Withnall, Adam. "Paris march: world leaders were not actually leading the crowd." The Independent, 12 January 2015.
Find a news photograph of a crowd. Where does the frame end, and what would you need to see to know how large the crowd was?
In the wild
Short examples of the technique at work, each with what to notice. The same examples are questions in the quiz, where the answer is not given away.
A campaign shares a photograph of its candidate shaking hands in a crowd; the full frame, found later, shows six people and an empty hall.
What to notice. Nothing in the picture is altered. The edges were chosen so that six people would read as a crowd.
A news site runs a tight crop of a politician grimacing at a memorial; the wider shot shows him squinting into the sun.
What to notice. The frame removed the sun. The expression is real and its meaning was supplied by the crop.
A charity's photograph of a village well is cropped so that the water truck parked beside it is out of the frame.
What to notice. The truck would have changed the story the well tells; the edge of the frame removed it.
Sources
- Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977. ISBN 978-0374226268
- Morris, Errol. Believing Is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography. New York: Penguin Press, 2011. ISBN 978-1594203015
- Brugioni, Dino A. Photo Fakery. Dulles, VA: Brassey's, 1999. ISBN 978-1574881660