As some of you perhaps happen to know, I am a graphic designer coming from Poland.
As more of you perhaps happen to know, there’s a story making rounds in the Internet of Microsoft Poland website featuring a digitally altered image where a black man has been replaced (poorly) with a white man.
A few jobs ago, so to say, I have been in situations like this one. Poland is an almost 100% white country; I would say that while in towns such as Warsaw there are other racial minorities totalling at best 1%, smaller towns and villages are 99.95% white. Most stock photography, though, is produced by Americans for Americans. Almost every time you see a group photograph from, say, Business Stock collection, it will feature, say, 8 white people, one Token Black Person and one Token Asian Person. No tattoos, no piercings, no risky decolletages, freshly pressed suits and shirts. You can almost smell Old Spice.
When my boss a few jobs ago approached me and told me to buy a business stock photo collection, I was faced with a task of finding the “whitest” one available. I honestly didn’t think my boss was being racist when he demanded that I do. And now that I read the comments to this altered photograph I still have a difficulty condemning the act as pure racism.
The purpose of using stock photography is to provide an image that people can identify and identify with. At the same time, it isn’t possible to always stage a photo shoot with actual Microsoft employees or office workers when you need to illustrate a situation. This is why stock photography was created — you go to a search engine, type “business meeting”, 4898 pictures pop out, you choose one, pay for it (that can be a lot of money sometimes) and plop it into your design. And then an intern in Poland gets the same photograph and is told to use it in the design as well.
The intern, or intern’s boss — I’d like to note I have no clue who the person is or who the agency is that does Microsoft Poland’s graphics — sees the photograph and thinks: this is very obviously an American group. It features a Caucasian person, an Asian person and an African American person. There is no way in hell a Polish person will identify with this group, because there are maybe 100 companies in Poland — out of a million — that could have a meeting like that. Not because Polish companies don’t hire Africans or Asians. But because there are hardly any available in Poland. So the photograph gets doctored and published.
This is a daily occurence in this business. Photographs get doctored ALL THE TIME. Most often the designer, when they look at a photograph, don’t apply their views to it. They analyse it from purely business point of view: does this photograph enable our customer base to identify with it? Will it sell the magazine? Will it make more people visit the website? Will people buy the product? In short: will this do? Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn’t. And then it needs to get changed.
It isn’t easy for me to defend an anonymous Polish Photoshop operator and their boss against accusations of racism, because I do believe Poland to be a rather racist country. It’s just that I don’t see racism on this photograph. I see a crap Photoshop job that has probably been completed within 30 minutes because someone decided it would be quicker and cheaper than buying a different stock photograph with, so to say, less races present. In a country with 10% black minority I would interpret that as an act of racism. In a country with less than 1%? I interpret it as a misguided attempt at making the picture easier to identify with.
Microsoft have quickly apologised and replaced the photograph with the original. I believe it was the right thing to do. The offense was unintentional, and once they realised someone was being offended, it was very quickly repaired. There was no fat rep booming “who gives a sh*t about some black people, it’s not like we have any” which would almost be an expected (by me) reaction.
And now, dear readers, if I haven’t bored you to death yet, tell me — do you see my point, or do you think I am simply unaware of my own racist views?
