Nikon picked 32 men photogs to promote camera

TO PROMOTE a new camera, Nikon enlisted 32 photographers from Asia, Africa and the Middle East to try it out and tell their stories on the company’s website.

But Nikon couldn’t – or didn’t – find any women to participate. All 32 were men.

It was a baffling oversight to many female photographers, who have no shortage of challenges finding opportunities in a notoriously male-dominated industry. In photojournalism, for example, women are underrepresented in staff jobs, awards, front-page placements and on conference panels, among other areas.

Still, the Nikon slight had people wondering: Not a single woman? Not one?

Nikon’s explanation, posted in a notquite-apologetic statement on its Asia-focused Twitter account, cited a lack of “better participation from female photographers”.

“Unfortunately, the female photographers we had invited for this meet were unable to attend, and we acknowledge that we had not put enough of a focus on this area,” the company said.

Nikon, which based in Tokyo, did not say how many female photographers it had invited to promote the camera, the D850 DSLR. But several women said it was the company’s responsibility to make sure they were represented.

“We’re here. We’re working. We exist,” Daniella Zalcman, a photojournalist based in London who created a database of female photographers, said in an interview. “The problem is the organisation not making the adequate effort to include us.”

In an emailed statement, Nikon said the all-male group was one of several efforts to market the camera, and that women participated in others, including female brand ambassadors in the United States.

“This unfortunate circumstance is not reflective of the value we place on female photographers and their enormous contributions to the field of photography,” the company said in the statement. “We know the conversation happening is an important one,” it continued.

“We appreciate the need to continue to improve the representation of women, and recognise our responsibility to support the immense creative talent of female photographers.”

Nikon acknowledged its shortcomings with women in its 2016 annual report, in which it lists “promotion of women’s empowerment” as a “priority issue”. As of March 2016, women represented 10.6 percent of Nikon employees and 4.7 percent of managers, the company reported. It set a target of 25 percent female employment by 2021.

Though women are the majority in undergraduate and graduate journalism programs, few women work on assignment for the major international wire services, The Times reported in February. Women account for about 15 percent of the submissions to the World Press Photo Awards, and major publications overwhelmingly highlighted the work of men in their roundups of 2016’s most significant images, ranging between 80 and 100 percent.

Tired of editors giving assignments mostly to men, Zalcman created Women Photograph to address the imbalance. The database lists 650 women in 87 countries. It includes 40 in Africa, 37 in Asia and 38 in the Middle East.

To not include women from those areas, she said, “almost seems like a mathematical impossibility”.

Melissa Lyttle, president of the National Press Photographers Association, called Nikon’s marketing attempt an “egregious slap in the face to advancement that’s happened in the past 20 years in our industry”.