My guess would be either this file is not a valid image, or permissions issues exist which are preventing this user from opening the file. Are you able to open this image in a browser when calling upon it directly?
If you're feeling brave, you could always launch a strace on httpd, perform the request for the script, and terminate the strace:
strace -vvFf -s 4096 -o strace.httpd $(ps -C httpd h | awk '{ print "-p " $1 }')
Once you complete the request, break out of the strace, fire it's output up in vi, and search for 'open("/absolute/path/to/file'. A glance at this open's return value or the system calls surrounding the open should give you some insight as to why this is occurring. If you don't find anything here, search for 'Read error!', then back track a little bit, and you might be able to find some relevant information there