Bidens and Carters Photo

About

Bidens and Carters Photo refers to a photograph of President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden visiting former president Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalynn Carter that drew the fascination of social media due to a trick in perspective that made the Bidens look abnormally larger than the Carters.

Origin

On May 3rd, 2021, Twitter^[1] account @CarterCenter posted a photograph of the Bidens visiting the Carters. The post gained over 9,000 retweets, 6,500 quote-tweets, and 79,000 likes (shown below).

Spread

The odd proportions of the Bidens and the Carters were quickly parodied on Twitter. Twitter user @DeonardoLeVinci^[2] replied to the picture with a photoshopped edit that made the Carters look giant, gaining over 1,200 retweets and 13,000 likes (shown below, left). On May 4th, user @BenBlippenstein^[3] posted a photoshop of Carter next to a stack of cookies, joking Carter was "for scale," gaining over 350 likes (shown below, right).

The jokes and fascination with the photo led several publications to investigate why it appeared so strange. The Washington Post^[4] wrote about the picture, writing:

"Although President Biden is kneeling much farther in front of Rosalynn Carter, the flash reduces shadows, a key part of what allows objects to have depth. The resulting effect is that Biden and Rosalynn Carter appear to be side-by-side on the same plane, she said. This illusion is magnified by the fact that the photographer probably used a very wide angle lens, which helps to capture everything in the frame from within a tight space."

Confusion about the picture was documented on a Twitter Events^[5] page (shown below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References