An Instagram post from Kodak recently infuriated Chinese people. In fact, it caused so much backlash that Kodak deleted the post and issued a public apology. The company shared a photo by French documentary photographer Patrick Wack, showing the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. They linked the photographer’s account which mentions the mass detentions of the Uyghur people in the area, which caused a fierce backlash.
Patrick Wack took photos in the areas of Central Asia known as East Turkistan or Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. It’s located in the Northwest of China and is under the current Chinese administration. What caused the backlash was Wack’s description of his upcoming monograph DUST.
A post shared by Patrick Wack (@patwack) Kodak shared one of Wack’s photos of East Turkistan, which is how the whole scandal began. Global Times writes that the post was accompanied by the same description as the one on Wack’s Instagram. Reportedly, it contained the phrases “mass arbitrary detention system being set up in the region,” and that the project is “a testimony to its [Xinjiang’s] abrupt descent into an Orwellian dystopia.” However, as PetaPixel points out, this is very unlikely. When sharing photographers’ work, Kodak writes their Instagram username, what Kodak product they used to make the photo, and a hashtag #MadeWithKodak. This is consistent throughout its account. So, it’s more likely that Chinese netizens clicked on Wack’s username in the description and saw his caption that mentions “mass arbitrary detention system” and the “Orwellian dystopia.” All in all, the photo in question has been deleted from Kodak’s Instagram. A statement replaced it, reading:
A post shared by Kodak (@kodak) [via PetaPixel; image credits: Miyake Juin, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]
