Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Photo of the Day: If this is over $50, I'll have to file a gift report

The photo below is from the photostream of the U.S. Embassy Kabul in Flickr. I don't know how many folks have their hands on the embassy's social media platforms. But for a while now, the photos uploaded to Flickr either have no captions or includes one caption for all the photos in the set. Which kind of defeats the purpose of having a photo gallery up, because viewers need to have some context on what they're looking at. 

The photo below, as well as all the 67 photos included in the set has the following caption:

The Acting Minister of Higher Education Sarwar Danish, together with NATO Assistant Secretary General for Public Diplomacy Kolinda Grabar and U.S. Embassy Director of Communications and Public Diplomacy Eileen O'Connor, joined university chancellors and others at the Ministry of Higher Education in Kabul to celebrate the progress of the PAS-funded NATO SILK Afghanistan Program on Tuesday, Oct 11, 2011.(Department of State)


It does not matter that NATO Assistant Secretary General for Public Diplomacy Kolinda Grabar is not in this photo. You get the idea; these folks were all there according to the caption.  During a big do on Silk Afghanistan.  I have no idea if this is a dressmaker's program or a silkworm propagation program either, hard to know without context, see?  The Silk Road? I really don't know.  Some 68 photos of smiling people but no photos of silk dressmakers or silkworm, or the Silk Road, for that matter, which is rather confusing to tell you the truth. 

The photo above shows the U.S. Embassy Director of Communications and Public Diplomacy Eileen O'Connor receiving a gift. I imagine she's saying, "Thank you very much for this gift; if this is over $50, I'll have to file a gift report."

Of course, that's probably not what she said to the gifter, but without context, we're left to our own imagination.





1 comment:

Anonymous said...

One of my chief complaints when dealing with ISAF or US Embassy's Flickr. I'm forced (like yourself) to make up captions of my own. Latest was "UK Soldier Smothers Toddler with Teddy Bear while Mother Looks on Confusedly". I'm just trying to be helpfupl.