If you’ve followed the story, mountaintop mining activist Maria Gunnoe was set to testify to Congress side-by-side with the photo of a naked girl in a bathtub filled with orange gunk. Then, the the GOP barred the use of the photo going so far as accusing Gunnoe after her testimony of being a child pornographer. That’s the political story (the matter pending now with the US Attorney).
Then we have the story of the photograph and the fact that this powerful image, which the family of the girl in the bath gave permission to accompany Ms. Gunnoe’s presentation in front of a Congressional committee (not to mention, a phalanx of DC photojournalists), is now next-to-nowhere to be seen.
She had prepared a slideshow presentation that included a photograph by the photojournalist Katie Falkenberg depicting a nude young girl sitting in a bathtub filled with murky brown water. The photo was meant as a salient statement to legislators on the impact of coal mining on society’s most vulnerable. ‘We are forced to bathe our children in polluted water,’ she said. ‘Or not bathe them.’”
