[support] getting rid of "soandso's picture" text

I'm using Drupal five, building a theme off of Zen. I want to optionally display a user's picture in posts, so that if the user has uploaded a picture then it is displayed, and if not then the teaser view shifts left to occupy that space. So I turned on pictures in the theme configuration. But now, where there is no picture available, I have a "soandso's picture" link. Specifically: I want if( $picture ){...} in the .tpl.php file to evaluate to FALSE if there is no picture, TRUE if there is one. How can I get this behavior? Is there a theme override that I'm missing?