Comment by theBobBob | Hacker News Reader

Comment by theBobBob | Hacker News Reader

There is a brilliant picture illustrating this. I tried to track it down but couldn't find it anywhere. It is actually three "different" pictures. The first is a soldier (I believe it was US soldier) giving a drink of water to a very tired or distressed looking man (I think he looked Middle Eastern). The second was a very tired or distressed looking man (the same one in the same pose) with a soldier (different to the first one) pointing an assault rifle a the unarmed man's head. The third was actually just the full pulled out picture i.e. a soldier giving water to a very tired or distressed looking man while another soldier held an assault rifle to his head. It very powerfully shows that you can be reporting on facts but depending on how you frame it (in this case literally) can completely change the message behind the "facts" that you are reporting on. One picture showed the US army as a generous saviour to this poor man. The other showed the US soldier as a monster that was pointing a rifle at a poor distressed man's head. The third showed that is was actually both or maybe neither. Really wish I could track that one down.

This is the uncropped image: https://i.imgur.com/hR2yEBe.jpg

And these are the versions with different framing: https://www.penser-critique.be/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/ca...

Looking at the full picture, that rifle is very likely not even pointed at the man being given water. I wouldn't be surprised to find that the solder with the weapon is facing away from the whole scene, and not watching the two helping the man on the ground at all.

I think it only looks like the rifle is pointed at the man because it was taken with a telephoto lens that compresses the depth of the image a lot.

The fact that the drink-giver's fingers are on the subject's head gives it away. No way his squad mate is pointing his gun anywhere near his colleague's fingers.

Really interesting to look at this a photographer. In the 'famous' image of the miners' strike a miner (wearing a toy police helmet) is at first glance staring into the face of a serious-looking real policeman opposite him. However, at a second, longer glance, the miner is clearly not actually opposite the policeman - his head is twice the size. The less famous image shows that the miner is actually opposite a line of policeman and the one directly in front of him has a much less intense expression (one has a slight smile / smirk). This is two different shots rather than two different crops of the same shot but the effect is as you describe.

Looking at the picture of the soldiers with the tired/distressed man, there are two soldiers on either side of the distressed man. A third soldier in the foreground is holding a gun. The angle of the image has the end of the gun directly above the man's head but it possible from the real geometry that the gun is only very loosely pointed at the man, and not at the top of his head at all. I'm not suggesting here that my interpretation is correct, but it again shows how ambiguous imagery can be, even when not edited to make a point.

Looking at the links of the photos from other commenters, is the gun actually pointed at man being given water? There's 3 US soldiers in frame, the one holding the guy and the one giving him water are both next to the guy, and the 3rd seems a few feet away, and could easily be holding his gun in a neutral position, pointed at the ground, giving a optical illusion similar to what tourists try to do with the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

Edit: Looked at it a bit more, the non-water giving adjacent US soldier is not holding the guy (I think his hands are bound behind his back by cuffs/rope/zip ties/whatever).

The man in question appears to be in an Iraqi army uniform, so is likely a POW. I also agree that the rifle muzzle is much closer to the photographer than the man, so much so that the focus is slightly off, and is being held in a neutral-but-ready position (which would make sense of covering POWs).

I wouldn't jump to either conclusion from just this one photograph.

Sharpness can drop off quickly outside the focal plane, depending on the aperture and other camera settings, so the gun barrel being blurry doesn't mean much. Whether it's 6 inches away from the POW or 6 feet away can be difficult to tell, and a photo could be staged to make either option plausible.

Sort of tangential, but this reminds me of The Guardian (the newspaper from the OP)'s TV ad from 1986: https://youtube.com/watch?v=_SsccRkLLzU

https://i.imgur.com/hR2yEBe.jpg

Found by entering "soldier gun water photo" in Google.

My Googling skills mustn't be what they used to be.

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