I like the picture at left. The colours are beautiful and the content doesn't offend me. But this picture has upset a lot of people. I understand why, because Cyrus is only about 15 years old here.

But it made me wonder, "Was it really necessary to portray her in this way?" I concluded, "Probably not," and here's why:

The pic at top is of Miley Cyrus taken by fan in hotel lobby w/cheap digital camera.
Below that is same pic cropped, rotated and edited in ps.
The 3rd pic, at left, is the controversial photo taken of Cyrus by Annie Leibowitz.

The middle pic is soft, and it doesn't have the cutting edge of the Leibowitz pic, but for a crappy low-rez, flash-taken pic taken in a hotel lobby by a fan with a $100 digital camera on auto-mode, then compressed, uploaded to the net, wherein someone - like me, for example - grabs if off the net and spends 15 minutes with it in photoshop, well...maybe something's not quite right.

A reasonable argument can be made, I believe, that you don't need an expensive camera or a huge file size to make someone look good and age appropriate. And Annie Leibowitz has been put on notice by media, that just because she's a famous photographer doesn't mean she has license to shoot someone in their teens who, lets face it... uh, just look at it.... I don't need to say it, do I?

There are choices. Leibowitz made hers and she has to live with it.