At Literary Hub, Ugandan climate justice activist Vanessa Nakate discusses her experience as the only non-white advocate at the World Economic Forum and the Associated Press’s decision to crop her out of a major news photo.
“The AP’s director of photography insisted that cropping me out hadn’t been a deliberate act of erasure but was done on ‘composition grounds’ by a photographer under intense time pressure,” Nakate says, “I’d been cut because the building behind me was distracting. But, aside from the fact that the cropped photo still contained two other buildings, the question is, distracting from what or whom? The Alps in the distance? My four white, European colleagues who were standing in front of the mountains? Or Greta herself?”
Nakate speaks about her passion for and commitment to raising awareness about the climate crisis and reporting stories from all parts of the world in her memoir-manifesto, A Bigger Picture: My Fight to Bring a New African Voice to the Climate Crisis.
