I believe it was Associated Press (not The Guardian) which cropped the kid out. Quite unfortunate, glad Vanessa didn’t take it quietly.
Right. The OP linked to a story in The Guardian pointing out how the AP cropped the photo.
That’s too rectangular–too wide, it would take up an additional newspaper column. Its also too close-cropped at the top for that type of photo.
The original crop of the photo (sans Ugandan) makes sense aesthetically and perhaps in a rush a photog might submit images they quickly cropped without much thought for anything other than photographic look.
With some photos you need to think at least twice before cropping because the extenuating circumstances are far more important than the aesthetics.
It is just not the same narrative without the young white girl crusading alone against the forces of evil to save the world.
Greta is now an icon and the image should not be diluted by bringing in others. Stick to the script, it’s Greta that we are paying attention to until she has been all used up and discarded like last year’s Pepsi slogan.
The photo at the PBS link shows all five young women, but the caption only mentions the four white women(!)
That to me is almost more strange. If the cropped pic (4 people not 5) had only captioned the four I can understand. But in a better photo which clearly shows all five as peers, leaving out one of the captions is not good.
It makes me wonder if the caption was left unchanged from a previously cropped image which was later changed to the more complete photo.
Well the enviromental movement has a big history of racism. Like Madison Grant.
So that might be a reason
:dubious: If you’ve got to go back to a guy who died in 1937 for your example of racism in “the environmental movement”, you’re not being as persuasive as you think you are. Pretty much all white Americans in the Jim Crow era were actively racist, and self-described “conservationists” like Grant were no exception.
If Little Miss Flavor of the Month hadn’t yelled at a bunch of fat old guys in suits, nobody would give a shit about this picture.
Classy.
Not giving a shit about the exclusion and erasure of people of color in activism and reform movements, even if it’s not caused by deliberate racist malevolence, is part of the problem. See, for example, this recent article on some young nonwhite environmental activists in the US, or this one about environmental activists in the developing world.
Yeah, and referring to Thunberg as “Little Miss” anything is kind of obnoxiously sexist. If you wouldn’t call a 17-year-old sports prodigy “Little Boy”, don’t call Thunberg “Little Miss”.
:rolleyes:
Ah, of course. I mean its not like there is a big problem with non-White activists being ignored, or that the movement long history of racism still affects it today or that the movement remains mostly white.
And FYI, 17-year old male athletes regularly the “kid” or “boy” or “lad”.
Though the posters comment was out of line regardless
Of course it’s a big problem, as I already acknowledged right there in the post above yours. But it’s a predictable part of the big problem of racism and non-white exclusion in society at large, not any kind of special evilness unique to the environmental movement. You were trying to finger the environmental movement as racist without acknowledging that larger context.
Threadshitting is a form of trolling. Expressing a view dismissing the issue might be acceptable. Using inflammatory language to do so is out of line.
This is a Warning to avoid such submissions in Great Debates or Politics & Elections.
[ /Moderating ]
She wasn’t specifically cropped out of the picture. the version with the 4 girls is cropped below the waste as well so the whole thing can better fill a frame and the subjects are more visible. It’s basic visual editing for whatever sized space their trying to fill.
If people think they should have cropped the girl on the right then the remaining image is poorly composed because the girl on the left is standing slightly away from the group.
If they just had some boys to crop out of the picture we wouldn’t be in this mess.
…I’m an experienced editorial photographer who has been commissioned and published by international news agencies. “Basic visual editing” always takes second place to editorial integrity. We know the image wasn’t cropped for the sized space it was trying to fill as you posit. They claim it was cropped by the photographer to make the background more visually pleasing. If we believe this claim then the photographer made an editorial decision to remove someone from the photo. Cropping a person out to make the image more visually pleasing was a bad editorial decision made by the photographer that should have been left to the photo editor.
Do you mean that last line seriously, or are you being snarky?
You seem to be saying “Obviously, she wasn’t cropped out with malicious intent, but if there had been boys, they certainly would have been”. You seem to be accusing people of being too sensitive, too quick to take offense about the case that actually did happen, while simultaneously being upset about a thing that didn’t happen, but that you feel sure would have happened, had the whole situation been different.
Manda JO, that seemed like snark to me.
How do you know it wasn’t made by the photo editor? the image was cropped side and bottom. It increases the visibility of the subject matter. It’s photo 101 to crop an image so the subject represents a sizeable portion of it.
who is the subject matter in the picture and what percentage of the image should the subject take up?
I seem to be saying there are all manner of ISM’s that can be applied. With no boys it’s sexism to portray the activists as all girls. You can play that game all day with different classifications.
I’m kinda wondering how the op knows the other four were young specimens of fine Aryan youths.
…because (as I said) of the cite provided by the OP.
Now having said that: something doesn’t sound right. A photographer under tight deadlines isn’t going to be cropping on composition grounds. And if they did crop for composition: they would send through more than one image and they would send through both the cropped photo and a wider one for context. So I don’t know if they are throwing the photographer under the bus or not. But like you I would have thought that this was a decision taken by the photo editor: but apparently it wasn’t.