Getty Images confuses “Star Wars” actress Kelly Marie Tran with Olympian Mirai Nagasu
A well known stock photo agency unprofessionally miscaptioned photos of two Asian American women because they wore similar colored dresses to the Oscars
Getty Images mislabeled images of Kelly Marie Tran as Mirai Nagasu and vise versa. Both Tran, a Vietnamese-American actress, and Nagasu, a Japanese-American Olympian, made their Oscar debuts in beautiful blue dresses. Although the color of the outfits are similar the designs were very different, along with the women being physically different.
According to the Metro, a number of outlets who use Getty Images have also mislabeled the photos of the women in their posts causing the mix up to spread. Getty Images released an apology for the miscaption, but some readers caught a misspelling of Tran’s last name which was written as “Tan” twice. The mistake has been since updated.
"Getty Images sincerely apologizes for the images of Kelly Marie Tran that incorrectly identified her as Olympian Mirai Nagasu and was licensed by customers who trusted the accuracy of the caption information. Getty Images holds itself to a high standard of editorial integrity and has robust measures in place to ensure our content ingestion process upholds these standards. We, like all news agencies, regret when these measures fail to capture an error. We distribute the work of a number of excellent image partners who are also covering major events such as The Oscars and as soon as the caption error was brought to our attention, the caption was amended and the correct images provided to our customers.
We apologize to Ms Tran and Ms Nagasu for this error and meant no disrespect."
However, fans were not having. The error brings back the racial stereotype that all asians look the same. The Huffington Post reported that this was not the first time Getty Images have confused Asian actresses. Previously it was Kimiko Glenn from “Orange Is The New Black” with “Downsizing” star Hong Chau.
As an Asian American woman I was proud to see Asian representation at the Oscars. For someone who works for a professional stock photo company to miscaption them like that makes me feel like the worker didn’t understand the importance of their presence. Even if the women wore similar outfits and are asian it takes a minute to double check which caption goes to which picture.