Photographer claims Newsweek butchered his photo

Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer, David Hume Kennerly, has launched an attack at Newsweek for cropping his photo and taking it out of context.

The American magazine ran an image of former vice president, Dick Cheney, butchering meat on a bloody carving board, which Kennerly said was cropped from the original image of Cheney preparing dinner together with his family.

Writing for the New York Times’ photojournalism blog yesterday, Kennerly, who was also a former contributing editor for Newsweek, said the new image “implied something sinister, macabre, or even evil was going on there.”

Kennerly said the decision to use the altered photgraph was 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.”

Newsweek defended its position, saying it cropped the photograph to make an editorial point about Cheney’s “red-blooded, steak-eating, full-throated defense of his views and values”.

In response to the post, Newsweek’s vice president of corporate communications, Frank J. De Maria, said: “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.”