Merkel-Trump G7 face-off photo headed for history books

An official photo posted by the German government showing a determined Angela Merkel standing up to an intransigent Donald Trump appears destined for the history books, summing up the deep fractures left by a disastrous G7 summit.

The already iconic picture by Berlin’s official photographer at the gathering in Canada, Jesco Denzel, set social media alight when it appeared on Saturday, hours before Trump ripped up the hard-fought summit conclusions in an angry tweetstorm.

The image, which drew comparisons to a Baroque painting, shows Merkel standing at the centre of the image leaning across a table before a seated Trump, his arms crossed in defiance.

Merkel, looking focused or exasperated depending on the viewer’s interpretation, is flanked by British Prime Minister Theresa May and French President Emmanuel Macron, their faces largely obscured. Shinzo Abe of Japan looks on with a world-weary expression.

Many saw a distillation of a crisis of the West in the photograph. Like virtually all German media, Berlin’s daily Tagesspiegel ran the picture prominently and said Trump’s caustic tweets upending the summit conclusions had "shaken the West".

Trump "uses Twitter to snub American’s partners in Europe and the world -- is the G7 finished?" Other observers hailed a triumph for the spin doctors in Berlin eager to present Merkel as the leading defender of the rules-based global order.

"A hands-down public relations triumph for Germany," news weekly Der Spiegel said on its website of the picture that for most of the weekend seemed to capture the world’s imagination. "In politics it’s not just content that counts but images too." A winner, however, is of course in the eye of the beholder.

Elisabeth Wehling, a political linguistics researcher at the University of California at Berkeley, tweeted that the body language clearly pointed to Trump dominating the scene.

"1:0 for the US president! Sitting while the other stands is a classic strategy of gestural framing, to establish one’s own authority and propagate it via pictures -- it works on global media because it transcends language barriers," she wrote.

US National Security Adviser John Bolton, who stands next to Trump in the picture and appears to be saying something to Macron across the table, tweeted the picture during the summit to tout the America First message.