Are the Bidens giants? Are the Carters tiny? Or are our eyes failing us?
Carters #Carters
On first glance, the photograph seems typical enough. President Biden and First lady Jill Biden kneel beside their predecessors in the White House, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, during a trip to Georgia last week.
But look closer at the image — a snapshot of two Democratic leaders with a decades-long alliance — and something appears to be terribly off: Both Bidens seem to tower over the Carters and the rest of the scene, as if they had been transported into a dollhouse.
After the image was shared late on Monday by the Carter Center, puzzled observers fired off a succession of both joking and serious questions: Were the Carters tiny, or were the Bidens giants? Was the image taken on the set of “The Hobbit?” Are eyes are merely playing tricks on us?
“I’ve been staring at this photo for three hours. I’ve got to go to bed. Back at it tomorrow,” one person wrote on Twitter, seemingly capturing the mood of the Internet. As of Tuesday morning, more than 13,000 people had retweeted one of several posts with some version of that inquiry.
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Never mind the many posts that riffed on the title of a 1989 science fiction comedy, declaring “Honey I Shrunk the Carters!” The explanation, according to Jonathan Alter, author of “His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, A Life,” lies somewhere in between variations in presidential height and unusual photography methods.
At 5′5″ and 5′10″, the Carters “aren’t tiny people, but they are in the medium to smaller size among presidents and first ladies,” Alter told The Washington Post. That, and “the fact that when you’re very old, you shrink.” (Joe Biden, by comparison, is just under 6 feet tall, although the first lady is about half a foot shorter.)
Marlena Sloss, a freelance photographer in San Francisco and contributor to The Washington Post, explained that the image also appeared to have been captured with strong flash and a wide-angle lens.
While President Biden is kneeling much further in front of Rosalynn Carter, the flash reduces the shadow — a key part of what allows objects to have depth — so the resulting effect is that Biden and Rosalynn Carter appear to be side-by-side on the same plane.
This illusion is magnified by the fact that the photographer likely used a very wide angle lens, which helps to capture everything in the frame from within a tight space.
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Another element, perhaps, was the fact that Carter maintains a slim build and has always been in good shape, Alter said. He regularly ran long distances while living in the White House, learned to ski in his 60s, and — even well into their 90s — went fly-fishing in exotic locales like Siberia. Jimmy Carter went decades post-presidency without using a walker, beginning to use one only in 2019.
Even now, at age 96, he tries to swim most days in a pool by their modest ranch home in Plains, Ga., Alter said. When the Bidens dropped by for a visit, Carter skipped his swimming hour to have tea with them and take the photo in question.
Throughout it all, Rosalynn — a pioneering force in mental health policy who some say was the most powerful first lady in U.S. history — was right alongside him in terms of physical endurance.
That ability became clear to Alter when he joined them a few years ago at a Habitat for Humanity build in Memphis “He’s a pro,” the author said, “but she had very good hammering stroke and a lot of experience.”
Alter’s main takeaway — on the whole presidential visit to Plains — has less to do with photography or height than with Carter himself. As the author noted, Biden’s trip last week was the first time a president has visited the tiny Georgia town since Carter had left office.
“What’s just wonderful to see,” he said, “is that he’s finally getting the appreciation that he’s long deserved.”