Photo in Tory ad is from foreign source
On Thursday, in his daily policy announcement during the election campaign, Conservative Leader Stephen Harper proposed an increase to the federal tax credit to underwrite parents’ cost of adopting children.
To promote the initiative, the Tories published images of a lovely young family lying in the grass together in a park.
But the picture comes as yet another example of the use of stock photography in political communication, in which models merely pretend to be the kind of Canadians who will benefit from whatever policy is being proposed.
And the only people making any money from the pictures are foreigners, while Canadian photographers are shut out.
The photo used in the Tory ad was taken by photographer Jure Gasparič, who lives and works in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
According to his Facebook page, Gasparič snapped the stock image when the family visited the Tivoli park in Ljubljana in August 2012.
Mom Naja Ferjan Ramirez may come from Slovenia originally but now resides in Seattle with the child’s father, Rafael Alejandro Ramirez. They both work at the University of Washington in Seattle, according to their Facebook pages.
There’s no sign either are Canadians who one day might benefit from a tax credit.
Further, it looks as though the adorable child in the picture used to promote the increased adoption tax credit is, perhaps, not actually adopted. Pictures on Naja’s Facebook page show the newborn child in hospital, with mom and dad, immediately after birth.
Whoever assembled the ad appeared to confuse the concept of international adoption — many kids adopted in Canada come from other countries and are of different ethnicity than their parents — with children born biologically to couples of different races. (In this case, the mom is white and the dad is black or Latino.)
Stock photos have often been used in politics, for instance when Tim Hudak’s Ontario Progressive Conservative campaign put out a video about job creation that used stock footage from Russia. Needless to say, that did little to create jobs for Ontario photographers either.