I haven’t been looking at many photos or videos of the Israeli-Hamas war. But one image is imprinted in my brain. It depicts six girls lying on the floor at a morgue following an Israeli strike. At first glance you might, as Lydia Polgreen writes, mistake the scene for a slumber party, the girls safely tucked into bed. But look closer and the dried blood starts to bleed into the frame. Looking at the original, un-cropped image of the six children, the full horror comes into view: one girl, second from the left is missing half her skull.
The New York Times decided not to run the original image depicting all six children, and instead, published a cropped version that reveals just the bottom portion of four of the children’s faces (above). The sheet draped over the children’s bodies makes up majority of the photo. Taken from a different perspective, the cropped photo could be considered art. The photographer…