Re: ‘Fatima’
By: Alex Myles
Tags: Twitter, Arts And Culture, UK Politics, Retraining, Advertising

One thing should be made clear. This advert was not produced by the government as part of their recent suggestions for those in more precarious industries to “adapt” i.e. to consider more stable jobs. But it does have very unfortunate resonance with today’s climate. Since the images have been removed from the National Cyber Security Centre’s (NCSC) website, it’s hard to know when this was released. It was however originally designed by the NCSC (which current Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden is all too keen to distance himself from) for the Cyberfirst programme (est. 2017), an initiative to encourage 11–17-year-old’s, particularly girls, to pursue cyber security as a career, by offering free courses and bursaries and the like.

The use of a ballet dancer is very peculiar, and upon further inspection, deliberate. The ad says that there’s a career waiting in ‘cyber’ (unclear) for ‘Fatima’, and most have taken this to mean she should give up her artistic ambitions and retrain in a salaried job. It’s not hard to see how people have come to this conclusion, especially now. It’s a poor advertisement with quite cynical messaging and a strange choice of imagery.

The photo itself is why I’m writing this. So this isn’t an NCSC photograph, it doesn’t belong to them nor did they commission a photographer. The original photograph was taken by an unconnected freelancer, Krys Alex, based in the U.S. The people behind the poster didn’t have to look very hard to find the photo either. Typing in “ballet dancer” on popular copyright-free site Unsplash, you do not have to scroll far to find it, it comes up halfway through the first page of results. The original photo though is very different to the one on the poster.

The original photo as seen on Unsplash and on Krys Alex’s Instagram

It captures two dancers from a dance troupe called Vibez in Motion, based in Atlanta, Georgia. Although Krys Alex uploaded the photograph on Unsplash, where images can be repurposed, she perhaps didn’t expect an arm of the British government to crop the photo and manipulate it for their incongruous message. I also imagine this photographer almost certainly didn’t expect her, albeit doctored, image to spread through Twitter like a wildfire, not in a positive way either. Her beautiful image is now inexorably connected to a social media storm.

While the poster was issued with the primary and rather innocuous aim of getting more young people into cyber security, there’s an underlying message here. The designer(s) thought it appropriate to deliberately use an image of a ballet dancer and suggest, implicitly, those with the same interests or even ambitions consider a safer job in cyber security.

The designer(s) of the poster/advert proceed to use the portrait without attribution or remuneration to the photographer, crop one dancer out of it, and completely repurpose the image. They also name the girl ‘Fatima’, giving one the impression that they sourced the dancer themselves, where really they just found an image from the internet. Calling a girl from Atlanta ‘Fatima’, a name of Arabic origin, can also be appropriately argued as problematic. The BBC have identified the dancers as Desire’e Kelley and Tasha Williams.

It’s ironic that this poster wasn’t meant to be a commentary on the arts per se but the careless appropriation of a freelance photographer’s work suggests otherwise, as does the cynical messaging. It’s not a crime to use images in this way, I have used images from Unsplash for articles but in my defence these were images of fruit and vegetables, in articles about fruit and vegetables. Nor did I give a name to each fruit and vegetable, deliberately crop out any fruit or vegetable, and suggest a career is waiting for a particular fruit or vegetable in cyber-security.

You’d like to think there’d be some alarm bells going off when this poster was shown in the meeting room. ‘Where has that photograph come from?’ ‘Why are we using this particular photo of a young ballet dancer?’ ‘Could it suggest young people should abandon their hopes and dreams for a more monotonous, government-funded career?’ are perhaps some of the questions you’d think would have been asked.

The poster was not produced recently in regard to the government’s stance on creatives amid this crisis, so the flak this got on social media was perhaps undeserved, incorrectly lambasting the government for producing this almost ad hoc. This advert is but one of a collection from the “Reboot” campaign and just so happens to be a ballet dancer. But by manipulating a photographer’s work, and by merely suggesting a ballet dancer should consider a safer career going forward can demonstrate this government’s indifference towards the arts.