STOPPT MENSCHENHANDEL

I saw (sans german fluency & before reading the caption) a blonde boy without shoes, in a shirt that at first looked like a camo pattern, but then looked more hawaiian. but what i saw first was his (now her) hands–one looks to be pressing to get out, while the other seems to be curled protectively around his/er neck. i couldn’t decide if this was more vulnerable or active, pushing to get out, or just both, where people push against negative pressures, but are also worried about the backlash. the airport tag & yellow sticker made it seem that this was not a rare thing, but one of thousands, institutionalized. i also thought it was weird/troubling how out of focus/blurry the face was, in comparison to the hand. very surreal, and easier to see several faces, making this an excellent representation of many.
the final thing i had trouble with was whether to immediately see it as a demonstration (ala peta, for example), or something that actually happened, i.e. scary. honestly, what decided me was the person’s hair/skin & clothes-not that it is impossible (or perhaps rare; i don’t know any statistics) for a scandinavian/german blonde youth in clean clothes & intact (no holes) socks to be entrapped like this, but it seemed somehow far less plausible, or often occurring, to me. After reading the caption I tried to imagine what the person would’ve had to look like for me to, even for a moment, see it as a real photo of such an injustice, or some similar injustice. colorings from africa, south, southeast & east asia, and latin america would probably have made me immediately read the picture as higher on the ‘real’ category, methinks. and i’m the same color as the people from a lot of those places, so i don’t quite feel like i’m immediately stereotyping the ‘other’ with which i have no experience.
maybe that says something about how particular races are portrayed visually in media, kinda like how Santa Ana uncovered that Latino immigrants were being linguistically portrayed by newspapers in particular negative metaphoric frames in his book Brown Tide Rising. sorry if that’s a bit much, i guess i saw a lot.

Human trafficking in Germany primarily comes from the east at the moment, with russian, polish, ukranian women making their way to brothels in the west. The blond hair and blue eyes are part of the trafficking trade at the moment and many of these women come through the airports. So I think it is apt to have the blond hair blue eyes part of the image…
the transparency of the suitcase meaning that it happens right before our eyes.

Human rights and the reality of the trade in human flesh… to see a women, child boy in a plastic container as you see fast food, cheap and available the reality on the market.

What I’m really struck by is picture number 12. This gets your attention, but number 12 keeps it.

I saw a woman crammed inside a suitcase, and immediately thought of human trafficing. Without knowing german. As a frequent flyer, the image made me feel a bit ill. One is crammed enough as an economy customer—which obviously is a whole different class of travel than someone who is traffic’d, but the physical sensation I had was one of being crammed down further from the economy seat to the suitcase in the hold…

I saw this photo – or, rather, one of the same subject in a slightly different pose – on the Washington Post’s photo-of-the-day slideshow, and it struck me, too. As someone who works in PR and media, I sometimes look for an event or photo-op that will cut through, but those are so hard to achieve, much less control (i.e., you’re depending on a news photographer to get that great image). I’ve also seen, and have tired of, the countless PETA demonstrations that just blur together as one – it’s always some young, nubile female naked somewhere. (Full disclosure: I am fully supportive of young, nubile females being naked, but that dilutes their message and even distracts from it.)
It’s nice to see a good “protestish” action that makes sense for the message, is visually compelling, tells a story, and really stands out.

I just feel claustrophobic looking at that picture. AUGH!