Grazia (thanks) for nothing

Is distorting Israel the latest hot fashion?

We’re angry at Grazia’s gratuitous misrepresentation of Israel in its latest issue.

If you are as angry at Grazia’s as we are, we encourage you to let Grazia know.

In the 20 February 2012 issue, the “Big Fashion Double Issue,” on page 26, among a spread of photographs of children’s rooms from around the world, a girl from the West Bank is featured. The pictures come from a photography book “Where Children Sleep,” by James Mollison, and Grazia shows eight children and their bedroom, from a book that is 120 pages.

What is shocking here isn’t the art; it’s about the presentation and the editing – the choices that Grazia made.

Its rhetoric is editorialising and sensationalist, whereas the photograph book editor – as far as we can tell because we don’t have access to the original source – is more subdued and just tells facts.

Grazia’s caption (emphasis added by us to highlight the rhetorical devices Grazia used):
“Douha, 10, shares this tiny bedroom – in a Palestinian refugee camp in Hebron, near Jerusalem – with her five sisters (she has 11 siblings in total). Her life has been severely affected by the conflict between Palestine and Israel; her brother Mohammed killed himself and 23 civilians in a suicide bomb attack in 1996. The family home was destroyed by the brutal Israeli military as a result.

And here is the what we suppose is the original caption:
Douha, 10, lives with her parents and 11 siblings in a Palestinian refugee camp in Hebron, in the West Bank. She shares a room with her five sisters. Douha attends a school 10 minutes’ walk away and wants to be a paediatrician. Her brother, Mohammed, killed himself and 23 civilians in a suicide attack against the Israelis in 1996. Afterwards the Israeli military destroyed the family home. Douha has a poster of Mohammed on her wall.
Source

Yes, the Palestinian girl in the picture doesn’t have a very large room, and she has a very sad look in her portrait. But so do most of the other children in the book, which had seed money from “Save the Children,” an international charity to help disadvantaged children. So there was a purpose to the photographs when the photographer started – to show the sad state of poor children’s beds across the world.

Certainly, the Palestinian girl is not the best off, but she’s not the worst off, by far. And Grazia doesn’t editorialise as much on any other caption.

Other things of note:
The original book of photos was released in September 2010, yet Grazia chooses now to highlight it as one of This Week’s Top 10 stories, as if this is new.

Both the original caption and, obviously, the Grazia caption downplay the brother Mohammed’s suicide bombing. For instance, we don’t know who died and where he bombed people, such as if it killed any children who would otherwise have had their bedroom been possible subjects for the photographer. Meanwhile, we are incredibly disappointed that after murdering 23 civilians, Mohammed is viewed heroically by his family that a mosaic of him smiling, proudly and smugly holding guns are in a prominent poster in the middler of his sisters’ room.

This is art, not journalism. They are in a documentary style, but they are also representing a certain viewpoint. The portraits of the children and their bedrooms and both posed, and the bedrooms framed and cropped in order to invoke the perspective of the photographer.

Much of Israel advocacy of the news focuses on newspapers, but this magazine is more dangerous. According to the company, Grazia has a circulation of 55,000 and readership of 170,000. Newspapers are thrown away, but this can circulate around a doctor’s office for two years or more. Grazia is part of a large conglomerate in Australia, and it is part of a large network of international magazines of the same title. There is no way to know who is responsible for this or how wide it is. This is something we are worried about, and we hope you might be able to help us keep track of it.