Just days after the 14 Riverside attack and the storm that fell on The New York Times for publishing gruesome pictures of the raid, some of the pictures have found their way to the auctioneer’s hammer.
Mr Kabir Dhanji, a Kenyan-born photojournalist, who has worked for some of the biggest international media houses, has decided to sell the pictures for as much as Sh50,000 per photo through Getty Images.
Getty is a visual media company with headquarters in Seattle, United States, which is a supplier of stock images, editorial photography, video and music with an archive of over 200 million assets.
Mr Dhanji has worked across Africa, covering and documenting the continent.
The self-taught photographer — with what he describes as a “skewed lens, that is constantly and forever learning to see and see again” — has put a price on the lifeless bodies of innocent people.
According to The Nation, Dusit photos are being auctioned and credit given to AFP. According to the caption, credit should be given to him, AFP and Getty Images.
This comes after Kenyans accused the New York Times of employing double standards by publishing bodies of attack victims in Africa, while concealing them when attacks happen in America.
The paper has largely been unapologetic despite a demand by the Media Council of Kenya and ordinary Kenyans to pull down the gory images.
But in an explainer published on Thursday, Mr Marc Lacey, NYT national editor, said the paper would “convene a group of people to come up with clearer guidelines.”
Mr Lacey said the decision to publish the picture had split the newsroom: “To give you a sense of how difficult these decisions are, there are people in the newsroom who felt in retrospect that we shouldn’t have run the Nairobi photo.”