New image library showcases the life experiences of culturally diverse Australians with disability

Cultural Perspectives managing director Pino Migliorino said the organisation had been heartened by the strong response to the MiAccess library, which was created to fill what he saw as a major gap in the media landscape.

“For too long, representation in media has been token at best – or missing altogether,” he said. “With the support of the Australian Government, we have worked with communities to capture authentic stories: families, children and individuals living with disability, shown in everyday moments of joy, love, and connection.”

The lack of images like this became clear when staff from Cultural Perspectives, a Sydney-based communications, marketing and public relations firm, went looking for photos to illustrate its own published materials and website. Such photos didn’t exist, or were culturally inappropriate.

“As with many aspects of Australian life, our cultural diversity is often missing in how we visually represent ourselves,” Migliorino said, launching the image library. “Whether on our TV screens, billboards, or in glossy magazines and pamphlets, an accurate representation of our visible cultural diversity is at best token and at worst totally missing.

“Cultural Perspectives is addressing this by producing a stock image library depicting cultural diversity and disability that will be made available at no cost. We embraced the project fully and wanted to ensure that the images showed real diversity within the disability community and showed people in real life settings in which access is important.”

Migliorino insists on personally reviewing and signing off all requests for the images, to ensure they are used with integrity and only in appropriate brands and media.

“The response has been amazing so far,” he told the Advocate. “We’ve had requests from places like the Public Service Commission of New South Wales, the human rights people in Queensland, a number of community organisations. It’s just been a really, really huge response, and what we’re getting a lot of is people saying, ‘Oh my God, this is so needed; we’ve never had this before.’ It’s hit a hidden nerve: where do we go for images which show diverse people?”

The federal Department of Health, Disability and Ageing provided financial backing for the project, while Canterbury Bankstown Council provided venues and spaces, free of charge, for the photography. Cultural Perspectives already had the people ready to smile for the cameras, thanks to its ongoing work in the sector.

“We do a lot of work in the disability space so what we’ve done is put together our people who trust us, and then we created these photo sessions and really worked around how to make them inclusive and empowering to the people,” Migliorino said. “All the people in the photos actually have a disability or support someone with a disability in an Australian context.”

“The beauty is it’s our people doing things,” he said. “Rather than being in the situation where they are just being supported or shown in a passive sense, we’ve got them in parks, we’ve got them in playgrounds, we’ve got them in libraries, we’ve got them accessing information. So, all of it is about reflecting the nature of life and what we want for people.”

It would be fair to say Pino is happy with the result. “Oh my God, those pictures with those kids and their enjoyment of things like playing with books in a library with their parents. I just found a lot of it was inspiring and it was made more inspiring by the participants themselves, who really got behind it,” he said. “We didn’t have a huge budget, but we worked within that, and everyone came on board. So, it was really exciting, and the response has been outstanding – literally thousands of views of the [launch] video already.”

The images are available free of charge to “organisations that are keen to diversify their communications with more inclusive images and who share the ethos of access and equity,” he said. “We’ve used a formal request process because I actually want to make sure that I approve how they’re used, and we actually licence people to use them in that way.”

The shoots resulted in more than 500 images but only 70 are so far available, which means Pino can chart their usage, and also freshen up the selection as it matures.

“We picked the images which we felt were most relevant to what people would want to do now,” he said. “We’ve got 70 available on the site, and they are being used really well.”

Requests have arrived from across Australia for photos to be used in training materials, internal communications, annual reports and other publications.

Pino hopes mainstream media will also draw from the image library to better reflect the reality of culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) people, and people within those communities living with disability.

“People with disability are already marginal in media representation,” he said. “People from non-English-speaking backgrounds with a disability are even more so. This is about saying: guess what? Disabled people come in all shapes, all sizes, all walks of life, and all colours.”

More information

The MiAccess image library can be viewed here: https://gallery.miaccess.com.au/