People of colour: there's a bias in how pictures are used to depict disease in global health publications

We started to realise how photographs can send the wrong message when we were approached, as a group of infectious disease specialists, to develop a presentation on resistance to antibiotics. Our audience was a clinical group in east Africa.

After speaking about this experience with colleagues from different ethnic backgrounds, we decided to look at how people are represented in global health literature and publications about antibiotic resistance and vaccination. In over 118 reports from 14 global health actors, there were 1,115 images. Of these, 859 included people. We found an over representation of people, including women and children of colour, in the images used. Two out of every three images were of people of colour, and for children this increased to nine out of every 10 images. Images that depicted people of colour were predominantly representing countries in the global south and were candid images of real life and often in healthcare settings.

Photographs are powerful in the imprint they leave in the collective psyche. There are ethical responsibilities in how we capture, contextualise and distribute photographs of people. Global health photography has a different purpose from journalism. But the lack of ethical standards or guidelines has blurred the distinction.

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