Marianne Merten

Political Bureau

THESE are the sens-ational photographs that were shot along-side the image the Democratic Alliance Student Organisation eventually chose to launch its controversial “In OUR society you wouldn’t look twice” campaign.

The couple featured in the photographs might not even be South African. They are most probably totally unaware that the least risque of their photoshoot sparked a typically gargantuan South African storm in a tea cup.

The ready-made image was sourced from an internet-based photo library, according to DA Youth national director Aimee Franklin, one of the five-strong national management team that created the poster.

“We sourced it online from a library of images… last year,” she told the Saturday Star, having dropped plans to shoot the image themselves.

A trawl through the internet photo library identified by Franklin, Shutterstock, threw up the same models in a range of significantly more explicit poses than the one selected for the Daso poster.

Still, the image that the DA Youth chose managed to spark heated public debate on social media and talk radio, with many objecting to what they called the sexual overtones.

Others, like ANC Gauteng caucus spokeswoman Gugu Ndima and Cosatu in KwaZulu-Natal, respectively, suggested that the poster had an “Irish coffee effect”, with white people on top, and entrenching “white supremacy”.

“Some black people still choose to be used as fronting apparatus in order to drive a blemished agenda of transformation,” Ndima wrote in The Star, saying putting black faces on posters or in prominent positions in the DA did not solve that party’s “deeper fundamental incongruities”.

KwaZulu-Natal Cosatu secretary Zet Luzipo put it bluntly: “The posture says join the DA to have an affair with a white person. The DA thinks our struggle for democracy was about the Immorality Act and the Group Areas Act. We will not be excited with having an affair with a white person; we will not be enticed by that.”

The response from Shutterstock to enquiries for the models’ contact details – according to a home page search, they apparently signed release forms – was that it could not confirm the photo was one of its own and therefore could not provide details of the two models.

“Unfortunately, Shutterstock policy prohibits me from revealing such information. As for the image itself… I can find no evidence that the image used in the picture was sourced from Shutterstock. I do note that… the image is available through several other stock photo outlets,” wrote William Clark, associate counsel at Shutterstock Images LLC in an e-mail response.

The New York-based photo library, which boasts 17 million royalty-free photos, charges between $19 (roughly R148) for one photo download and $49 (around R382) for five pictures, but also offers subscription terms starting at $249 (around R1 942) for a month at 25 photo downloads a day and up to $2 559 (around R19 960) for a year’s subscription.

However, the DA Youth this week remained adamant that the poster campaign, launched to coincide with university registrations, was right for the time to open a public and honest debate on race.

DA Youth leader Makashule Gana said the poster was “unapologetically intended to provoke debate”.

Franklin said she was shocked by some of the responses, including talk that the poster was “encouraging interbreeding… and ending up with a diluted mongrel race”.

This showed “how intolerant” large sections of society still were, she said, even though there had also been many positive responses, including from interracial couples.

“We are glad (that we did this) because it really hit home for us,” Franklin said.

“I’ve been horrified. This is a bigger problem than we thought.”