Virgin Mobile sued for using Flickr photo

by Racialicious guest contributor Jennifer Fang, originally published at Reappropriate

Photos on photo sharing sites like Flickr.com or Photobucket.com just might appear on billboards somewhere halfway across the globe.

That’s what happened to an Asian American girl named Alison Chang. Her friend (screenname chewywong) took this picture of her while she was at a church barbeque:

The photo was then posted on chewywong’s Flickr account. Incidentally, chewywong has over 680 pages of photos, suggesting to me that this man is the visual archivist of this little group of church-going Asian American youths.

Then Virgin Mobile Australia entered the picture. After finding Alison’s photo on Flickr, they created a billboard ad campaign, including her photo (without her permission) in this ad:

Alison never gave her permission to be in this ad campaign. And certainly not in an ad campaign that depends so heavily on the Perpetual Foreigner stereotype, implying that she is some sort of foreign, geeky Asian penpal who couldn’t possibly be a citizen of a Westernized country. Wrote one person on chewywong’s Flickr account:

What people don’t seem to get here is, they are obviously using stereotype by randomly choosing any Asian girl, and think she is some Japanese schoolgirl that would have a pen pal in Australia. When in in fact she is a normal American citizen that has her photo up on the web. We all know that we ourselves have written a letter to our Japanese counterparts, but not all penpals are Asian! Especially with her little peace sign thrown up, they take one look and say, “Oh, a typical Japanese schoolgirl!” I would not like it if I was walking down the street and people would look at me as their penpal. In fact I hate writing letters.

Advertising is all about what the viewer thinks when they see the advertisement, and in this case, the advertisement depicts Alison as some sort of reviled Asian nerd and social outcast, who a cool Westernized Australian wouldn’t possibly want to keep as a penpal because now they have text messaging and can text their Australian (i.e. not Asian) friends!

Interestingly, this ad is part of a series of ads that have pulled images from private Flickr accounts. However, as shown in this blog post, most of the other ads feature images where the faces of the people in question are non-distinct. Only the ad featuring Alison shows her unobscured face, which begs the question as to why they felt comfortable using Alison’s photo for a rather denigrating ad text, while protecting the identities of their other “models”.

Alison’s family has filed a lawsuit against Virgin Mobile for the ads, after failing to hear from the company responsible for the ads. For more information, you can follow this discussion or check out the CNN report here.