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No, I wasn't counting the photos with Khan in them. As the guide itself says multiple times explicitly, real Londoners are diverse. The British family walking alongside the Thames are not real Londoners (according to the guide), but because of his brown skin, Khan bestows legitimate Londonness (even if he is an Uncle Tom).
I don't think it's necessary to bend over backwards to ignore what the authors of this guide are bashing us over the head with:
p6: Brand principles: We reflect the city’s diversity and openness.
p32: Photography supports our message and is...diverse
p33: The photos we use should reflect a recognisable, real and diverse London.
p35: [Photography] reflects diversity
p42: We should show a true, diverse London that Londoners can relate to.
p43: To fully document the event, we use different perspectives [that are] diverse
p47: [British family] doesn't represent real Londoners
p48: [Preferred social media shots] show audience diversity and their reaction
p50: Audience - Showing diversity and their reaction
p52: Encourage diversity in images
I'm not disputing that they want racial diversity in their photographs. They clearly do, and that's fine. What I'm disputing is this bizarre notion is that because one of the 'bad' photos has white people in it therefore they think white people can't be Londoners, despite all the other white people in the good photos. What about the almost exclusively white street scene? That family actually doesn't look like an 'ordinary London one', the problem being their location especially along with general demeanour that makes them look like tourists.
I'd be more amenable to that explanation if the caption read 'photos of tourists' or 'staged demeanour'.
But it didn't, it said they don't represent real Londoners. Their complaint was specifically about representation, not about the staging of the photo. According to the authors of that guide, a British family with a father, mother and two children are not representative of real Londoners. The guide also included about half a dozen other mentions of how real Londoners are diverse.
Moreover, their explanation when caught was that the 'caption was added in error' which is about as plausible as 'my twitter was hacked'. Documents like this don't get made or disseminated without half a dozen people proof-reading them. They knew what they were writing, they just didn't expect any tabloid journalists to read it.
Epistemic charity means taking people at their word, it doesn't mean rewriting their words into something they never said.
They don't. The word 'represent' doesn't have to mean race. Tourists on a day trip do not represent real Londoners. And again, what about the almost exclusively white street scene?
Do you really think that they wrote 'this photo does not represent real Londoners' with the intention that the reader interpret this to mean 'these people look like tourists'. If they had wanted to say that the family looked like tourists, they could have written that. But they didn't, they wrote a caption which a normal person would interpret to mean that the photo has inadequate racial representation. If they meant what you're claiming they meant, they could have said that the caption was poorly worded. Instead they said it was 'added in error' whatever that means.
As for the street photo, I'm not sure which one you're referring to, but you answer your own question regardless. Mostly white is okay because this still has diversity, entirely white is bad because this photo is not diverse and therefore the people don't represent real Londoners.
Not necessarily tourists exactly, but yeah I do think they just meant generally don't look like ordinary people doing ordinary things. So either tourists or at least atypical Londoners. I suspect the 'in error' thing was to just shut the press up.
When I said 'mostly white' that was a bit misleading, what I meant is that the people you can see clearly are all white, its just that with any large street scene there are people you can't see clearly in the background whose race is ambiguous. But the people in the foreground are all white.
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