YESTERDAY I was admiring to a colleague the portraits of world leaders by Platon, a photographer for the New Yorker, shot at September's UN General Assembly. I liked Platon's unusual Barack Obama, for example. Nearly every photo of the president has him smiling slightly with his eyes, if not with his mouth. Platon's Obama, shot in his trademark close-up and wide-angle style, has none of this. (I was disappointed, though, to learn that the shot was not actually from the General Assembly, but was an older Platon portrait.)

Page through Platon's gallery and you see other interesting choices. Benjamin Netanyahu jokingly told Platon to "make me look good". Platon responded by choosing a photo of the Israeli with lip slightly curled, not quite a sneer, but not quite not a sneer. Jacob Zuma looks positively crododilic. Muammar Ghaddafi looks as daffy as he is. Ban Ki-Moon’s portrait is uninspiring; it could be his official press portrait. The formats and poses vary too: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hugo Chavez both emerge from black backgrounds like dark waters. Mr Qaddafi is given nearly full-body treatment, but in the wide- and low-angle style—not particularly flattering—that Platon made famous with the famous "crotch" portrait of Bill Clinton. Among other things it tends to give the subjects huge, Rodin-like hands, and can emphasise jowls and the like. (The last picture in the UN gallery shows how unusually close Platon's style requires him to get to the subject.)

Among other things, I didn't much like the magazine's layout. It was a bit too cute to counterpose, in the first two full-page portraits, Messrs Ahmadinejad and Obama, or on the next two, Mr Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas. Get it? They're in conflict. I much prefer the online version, an alphabetic gallery of mug-shots that lets the viewer react to the photos themselves, not to their layout or positioning. 

But wait a minute. Does even talking about this with aesthetic interest mean that I'm comfortable with evil?

That's what Leon Wieseltier of the New Republic thinks. Platon described Mr Ahmadinejad as surprisingly small, playful and innocent looking, which he said was an "irony". This, presumably, because Platon knows that this man threatens stability with his country's pursuit of a nuclear capability, all the while minimising the Holocaust and making clear he'd like a Middle East without Israel.

For Mr Wieseltier, calling Mr Ahmadinejad's twinkling eyes "ironic" is not enough. The Iranian is evil, and if we do not hate him publicly, we do not understand evil. Platon's pictures are "silly sanitizations". Or something like that.

But what does this mean for the portraitist? Does Mr Wieseltier think that this fascinating gallery should never have been shot? Or that Platon should have shot only friendly democratic leaders? Platon says, in the audio that accompanies the shot, that he sought not to make a scary caricature. Should he have done, somehow tricking Mr Ahmadinejad into looking evil? Jill Greenberg, another photographer, did so to John McCain last year, and it was rightly considered a disgrace. Would Mr Wieseltier have wanted Platon to do the same? He acknowledges that the smirk is Mr Ahmadinejad's trademark. We should worry that Iran's president can say the things that he does with eyes ever sparkling. But that is hardly Platon's fault, even if the audio reveals that he was naive in thinking he was the first to have spotted it.

Mr Wieseltier can wield a wicked pen. But he falls flat here, with the old saw that modern society just doesn't hate evil enough. He would have done better to stick with criticising Platon's portraits on some kind of aesthetic grounds. As literary editor, his official title, he should have remembered: Platon is an artist, not a political polemicist or even a photojournalist. It has never been art's job to avoid evil, but to stand right in front of it and take its measure. It's actually very hard to do—to physically get a Qaddafi or a Chavez or an Ahmadinejad four feet away from you and do your job with cool. Much harder, incidentally, than it is to cry "evil" from your Washington journalist's office, surrounded with the comfort of like-minded colleagues, confronting nothing scarier than a computer screen, blank, waiting for this week's enraged column to be typed up.

(Photo credit: Screenshot of the New Yorker's website, where Platon's photos are featured.)