Can't get the author's picture printed onto a node in Drupal 7
Have you tried examining the $user object itself? It should be something like 

    &lt;?php
    global $user;
    print $user-&gt;picture;
    ?&gt;


Or if that is loading the logged in user(which it will) as opposed to the user(creator of the node) you are viewing try on a node:

&lt;?php
$user_object = user_load($uid));
print $user_object-&gt;picture;
?&gt;