Nine years ago it was a fiction intended to make us laugh. Today it’s a reality that should only make us wince.
For the cover of their Spring & Summer FUN Guide (a “Toronto Parks, Forestry and Recreation booklet filled with programs and services for people of all ages” distributed to “community centres, civic centres, libraries and City Hall after February 22, 2009″), the City of Toronto digitally altered a stock photo of a family to replace the tan-skinned father with a darker-skinned one, according to the National Post.
The original photograph, showing four people of radically different genders and ages, was apparently not diverse enough. They were also unacceptably comfortable in each other’s presence, so a degree of painful and obvious awkwardness was added by making the image manipulation stick out like the blazing of the sun at noonday.
Reading some of the comments on this recent magazine-based malfeasance, as reported initially at the National Post’s newsblog, is a frustrating and weird experience. User “myuill” is unimpressed:
And so why is this a story? The city Photoshopped someone into a marketing piece … cool. When the National Post stops using electronic tools to increase saturation, improve contrast, sharpen, denoise, bring out hilights and lighten dark tones in NEWS stories let us know.
Otherwise this is hardly newsworthy.
The writer’s committment to the ideals being upheld by the shoddily-manufactured propaganda of the magazine cover is breathtaking and worthy of applause. Only a race ideologue could refuse to see the absurdity of the decision that was made and the manner in which it was carried out.
