Peter Dutton's Unflattering Face

Submission 15,638

About

Peter Dutton's Unflattering Face is a photoshop meme based on a poorly-lit photograph of the Australian Immigration Minister Peter Dutton that was taken by a news reporter at a press conference held on May 3rd, 2016. The image promptly went viral after Dutton's staffer requested the photojournalist to remove the photograph from Twitter, which in turn triggered a series of jokes poking fun at the Australian minister's forbidding appearance and the officials' ill-conceived attempt at media censorship.

Origin

On May 2nd, 2016, Australia's Ministry of Immigration and Border Protection called for a press conference in response to two Somali refugees who set themselves on fire while seeking asylum in the country. As Minister Peter Dutton entered the dimly-lit room and approached the podium before the bursts of camera flashes, Fairfax Media's political reporter Stephanie Peatling^[1] tweeted a photograph of the Minister with a large portion of his face obscured in shadow (shown below).

Spread

Shortly after Peatling shared the photograph on Twitter, the reporter was contacted by Dutton's staffer with a request to remove the tweet as it portrayed him in an "unflattering" manner. Peatling then complied with the request and immediately followed up with a tweet^[2] explaining her reason for the removal, which soon brought on even more attention to the image from the Australian social media.

About an hour later, Australian journalist Dave Donovan^[3] tweeted the same photograph of Peter Dutton in question (shown below), thereby implicitly invoking the Internet's long-standing anti-censorship phenomenon known as the Streisand Effect.

On May 3rd, Redditor MonthofMarch submitted the original image of Peter Dutton to /r/PhotoshopBattles^[4] in a post titled "Australia's Immigration minister Peter Dutton wants this photo removed," which quickly took off and drew nearly 100 photoshopped parodies based on Dutton's "unflattering" photograph. Throughout the day, Australian Ministry of Immigration's public relations debacle was reported on by various local news outlets, as well as several major English-language news sites overseas, including Sydney Morning Herald^[5], SBS^[7], Business Insider^[11], The Guardian^[14] and BuzzFeed^[10], among others.

Examples

In the following 48 hours, the unflattering photograph in question continued to emerge on Twitter, Reddit, Imgur and elsewhere online, along with a series of satirical tweets and photoshopped parodies mocking the villainous image of Dutton's face.