of prejudice and photographic portraits.

 Here are two photographic portraits from two consecutive days. They were carried as Agency reports   in the local  Nepali Press.  They tell a familiar tale of prejudice and stereotyping by two Western New Agencies. Reuters and Agence France Presse.

Compare the two portraits - you do not have to do it too carefully.  The French President's photograph is a carefully posed . It is a respectful, official portrait.  Laxmi Mittal, the' villian' in the piece, has been presented  a lot more disrespectfully  His portrait is a grab shot that makes him look somehow evil. And it is not just him having a bad hair day, either.  The Mittal portrait  is so illustrative  of  the way in which  the lesser " Other" is portrayed  by  Western Media.  With prejudice towards the  lesser Other. 

What bothers me, though , is that the local editors in the Asian Media used the  obviously unequal portrayals without a thought of the game being played out. And they even repeated the  Mittal portrait the  next day.  

 I wonder if they  don't really know about how portraits are and have been used to demonise people.

  The famous OJ Simpson cover portrait on Time magazine comes to mind as I look at the Mittal photograph.  "Time" magazine manipulated the image to make him look evil.  They had to withdraw the  cover. 

 Nothing of the sort will happen here.

he racial controversy over O.J. Simpson began, of course, with the murder of a white woman and white man by a black suspect, but it was seen visually the minute the issues of Time andNewsweek first came out.  It triggered a pull-back of a cover, an unprecedented action in the publishing history of news magazines.  Here's what their initial June 27, 1994 issues first looked like:

Here's where it got interesting.  Almost immediately after hitting the stands, Time was accused of racism by minority groups for its photographic alteration of the famous O.J. arrest photo.  The editors defended their choice by saying that they had taken that creative license to show the shadow that had descended on his reputation that week.  Illustrator Matt Mahurin was the one to alter the image, saying later that he "wanted to make it more artful, more compelling."  Enough readers, however, said that they saw the white man stacking the deck by "demonizing" the black man, that Time did something it had never done before and has never done since.  They issued a second cover and pulled the first one.  Essentially this meant that only mail subscribers ever saw the first cover.  Here they are side-by-side for your own inspection.

http://blogcritics.org/sports/article/ojs-last-run-a-tale-of/