Ever wondered if the stereotypes of famine are a thing of the past? Ever thought that surely now, in 2010, no one takes images of fly blown children anymore? Then think about this image and its caption, from Boston.com’s Big Picture review of the year’s photographs.
UPDATE 20/12/10:
Shortly after posting this, Charlie Beckett alerted me to this video example from Save the Children. It was published in July this year:
UN Europe’s WeCanEndPoverty campaign was a competition for images to promote awareness of the Millennium Development Goals.
Stefán Einarsson, from Reykjavík, Iceland won the competition with this poster “We are still waiting”, calls on world leaders to live up to their promises of ending poverty by 2015.
Twenty-nine other works were also chosen as finalists, and Einarsson had another two posters amongst those. Each deployed the stereotypical child and disturbing ways, indicating the continuing power of this iconography.
Unsurprisingly, the manipulated image of President Obama as the stereotypical child has become controversial.
