Élections Montréal criticized for low-quality, featureless photos of Black candidates

Some candidates are calling on Élections Montréal to be more inclusive going forward, after initially uploading several shadowy, somber photos of Black candidates on its website. 

The images are part of a pilot project to better inform voters about the candidates running in the municipal election. It includes uploading photos and bios of prospective councillors online and adding images to ballots. 

Carol-Ann Hoyte, who is running as a city councillor with Transition Montréal in the Côte-des-Neiges district, said she was unsettled by her photo on the Élections Montréal website.

“You would not believe it is the same person,” she said. “I don’t know why anyone would vote for me based on that picture alone.”

Hoyte said Transition Montréal took and intended to use professional headshots of all of its party’s candidates, until it found out at the last minute that Élections Montréal required the contenders to use passport-style pictures and that they had to be displayed in black and white. 

The party adjusted its photos to a black-and-white setting and adjusted the proportions to mimic passport sizing.

But when Hoyte tried to submit her application with a black and white photocopy of her headshot, she said, an Élections Montréal worker told her to get a passport photo taken at a nearby pharmacy. The photocopies may not have been the right size, she added.

When they were finally posted on the site, she noticed that for herself and many other dark skinned candidates, the results were deplorable, she said.

“They’re so dark that it’s hard to see features on their faces or sometimes you only see someone’s eyes,” she said.

“If they had consulted with people from other cultural communities they could have said ‘Oh, if the people are brown or Black they need to be different or maybe they should get their photos taken this way.”

Joseanne Cudjoe, a Critical Race and Gender Studies scholar at the University of Toronto, explains that the way the photos were displayed on the site, plays into racist tropes.

“Darkness on the whole has always been attributed to being evil, being malicious, being shady and that has real world implications on these candidates,” she said.

“These photos seem to reaffirm this notion that they too are not fully human, that they might have some kind of underlying sneakiness.”

In a statement, Élections Montréal acknowledges the issue. 

It says that leading up to the nomination deadline on Oct. 3, it prioritized getting candidate profiles online quickly. It says it continues to process information from the more than 400 candidates, which could include reuploading or rescanning photos.

“If this processing is insufficient at the web presentation level, we do not exclude the possibility of requesting a photo in a different medium,” says the organization.

In the days following CBC’s contact with the organization, some of the photos of dark-skinned candidates have already been adjusted on the website.

Renate Betts, who is also running as a city councillor with Transition Montréal in the Loyola district, said she appreciates Élections Montréal’s efforts to modernize its election process, but that the organization must avoid centering its projects around what works for white faces. 

“If representation isn’t there or is not being heard, then something that started off with the best of intentions fails utterly,” she said.

Hoyte said she hopes Élections Montréal gives her the chance to resubmit her photo and in the future, gives parties better guidance on lighting and photo requirements for Black candidates.

“In my heart I don’t think it’s intentional, I just think it’s a glaring oversight and has to be rectified,” she said.