A hipster who was upset at a mag for using a photo of him to imply all hipsters look the same has discovered that the picture was of a completely different hipster.
In February, MIT Technology Review published a research paper which, essentially, was about how hipsters can end up looking alike.
The article also included a stock image of a standard millennial dude wearing a flanno and a beanie.
A few days later, the MIT journal’s editor-in-chief, Gideon Lichfield, tweeted about what happened after publishing the paper…
A few days ago we ran a piece in @techreview about some research purporting to explain the “hipster effect”—the fact that nonconformists often end up nonconforming in the same way. We used a stock Getty photo of a hipster-ish-looking man. https://t.co/8LB6qLSmgS
— Gideon Lichfield (@glichfield) March 6, 2019
We promptly got a furious email from a man who said he was the guy in the photo. He accused us of slandering him, presumably by implying he was a hipster, and of using the pic without his permission. (He wasn’t too complimentary about the story, either.)
— Gideon Lichfield (@glichfield) March 6, 2019
Now, as far as I know, calling someone a hipster isn’t slander, no matter how much they may hate it. Still, we would never use a picture without the proper license or model release. So we checked the license. https://t.co/uFPXXNlEid
— Gideon Lichfield (@glichfield) March 6, 2019
Lichfield went on to say that the image indeed had restrictions, such as if it was used “in connection with a subject that would be unflattering or unduly controversial to a reasonable person (for example, sexually transmitted diseases)”, you should make it clear that the person is a model.
We weren’t implying that the model had an STD, only that he was a hipster. We didn’t think this met the definition of “unflattering or unduly controversial.” But we thought of swapping it out for a different picture anyway, because, you know, who needs the hassle?
— Gideon Lichfield (@glichfield) March 6, 2019
And he’s right, it would’ve been easier just to swap out the pic, but the journal’s creative director said “over my dead body”
But Eric Mongeon, @techreview‘s fearless creative director, said, “Over my dead body are we taking down a perfectly good image because some dude doesn’t like being called a hipster.” Or words to that effect.
— Gideon Lichfield (@glichfield) March 6, 2019
Eric contacted Getty Images. Getty looked in their archive for the model release. And came back to us with the surprising news: the model’s name wasn’t the name of our angry hipster-hater.
— Gideon Lichfield (@glichfield) March 6, 2019
In other words, the guy who’d threatened to sue us for misusing his image wasn’t the one in the photo. He’d misidentified himself.
All of which just proves the story we ran: Hipsters look so much alike that they can’t even tell themselves apart from each other. /ENDS
— Gideon Lichfield (@glichfield) March 6, 2019
