Where's our photo credit?

Timoci Gaunavinaka, Nausori

A few months ago, a regional photo competition was run by the COP23 Secretariat to choose some photos from photographers throughout the Pacific region to be showcased at Bonn, Germany.

Each photographer must also write a little caption describing the relevance of the photo they submitted to climate change and the images must be of very high resolutions.

I asked a friend of mine Tevita Vucoka to accompany me and we drove down to Togoru, Navua and made a sevusevu to their village headman, Semisi, Dunn and got their permission to take photos of their coastline.

I wrote its caption and submitted it to the competition.

A couple of weeks after the closing of the competition, I was advised by the COP23 office that my photo with its caption had been selected to be one of the photos to be displayed in Bonn. My photo together with others selected and with each of the caption we wrote were each given a page of their own on the COP23 official website together with our names.

I am surprised today that the photo I took at Togoru together with four others from the region is displayed on two whole pages in the other newspaper.

Sadly, our names as the photographers and caption writers were never mentioned at all despite the fact that it is clearly described on the COP 23 website: https://cop23.com.fj/cop23pacific-phot…/timoci-gaunavinaka/

As photographers, we have dedicated our time, funds, equipment and talents to capture such images in our free contribution to the global effort on Climate Change.

It makes us feel as if these photos just fell like manna from the sky direct onto the publication and their captions were all written by ghosts.