Photography, Ethics, Politics…

THE PHOTOGRAPHS WERE EXCELLENT. The issues they brought to light important and universal. The presentation and the talk was interesting and I was looking forward to the conversation afterwards. And that, too, was compelling for the most part, but there were questions that bothered me. These questions tend to follow a script. It usually starts with something along the lines of “How do you build a rapport with people you photograph?” Then it progresses to “Would you say you have a relationship with them?” and then it, inevitably, deteriorates into “Do you have their consent? What gives you the right to photograph these people? This is not your story.” These days, it often ends with “You don’t have the right to photograph at all.”

I think part of the problem is that these conversations are as old as daguerreotypes and so, like any old man, I am somewhat bored by them and I feel like yelling at this new generation of photographers: “Read a goddamn book.” Of course, we need to have these conversations all the time so here is my side of it…

When it comes to documentary photography and especially photojournalism, conversations about ethics have been around for a very long time, dating right back to the beginning of the medium. I think what has changed is the nature of those conversations and that change is driven largely by people for whom photography, especially documentary photography, is something they study rather than do. In order to appreciate where we are at the moment, it’s important to understand what’s happening in the world of academia.

If you, like me, had straddled the academic and non-academic worlds for almost two decades, you, too would not be shocked that we find ourselves here. Codifying ethics in academic research is a surpsingly novel idea. The code of ethics became necessary in natural and medical sciences (not the practice of medicine — doctors have been grappling with their ethical problems for millennia) because of fairly widespread abuses and the dangers some of the discoveries started to pose to the planet and our survival on it. Those notions of ethics eventually extended into social sciences, arts and humanities and found a fertile ground among scholars steeped in the ideas of post-structuralism and post-modernism. And, as these things happen, they got carried away. Kevin Haggerty’s article Ethics Creep: Governing Social Science Research in the Name of Ethics is a pretty good place to start exploring what happened with the notion of ethics in the academic world. And here is a less academic and more recent take on it by Ryan Briggs in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

As the opportunities to make a living with art and documentary photography declined and formal art education became one of, and sometimes mandatory criteria to access the remaining funding crumbs, the next generation of photographers entered this academic world of large egos, small stakes, little craft, much rhetoric and ferocious competition and they fitted right in. The academic notions of ethics were immediately applied to the photographic medium — even retroactively — and the questions of who gets to tell what stories, the questions of representation and power dynamics, privacy, and perceived rights became the bedrock of what we now talk about when we talk about ethics in photography.

The photographers did not show up at the gates of the academia empty handed. They, together with artists and writers, brought with them decades of very carefully shaped ways of thinking about stories and artistic expression. And some of that shaping was done for them. As the era of Cold War and McCarthyism gripped America, the CIA, with the earnest help of the State Department and private foundations, promoted a particular kind of artistic expression — one that made it clear that capitalism and democracy can compete with cultural production coming out of the Soviet Union while promoting the value of domestic bliss and rugged individualism rather than the value of collective experience and action preferred by the political commissars on the other side of the Iron Curtain. (Go read Eric Bennett’s excellent article on How America Taught the World to Write Small and Lucie Levine’s fascinating piece examining whether modern art was a CIA psy-op.) That it worked as well as it did is a bit of a miracle. I mean, these are the people who famously have been trying to kill Fidel Castro since the 1960s with an exploding cigar, a contaminated diving suite, and a poison pen, among other things. Castro died in 2016 at the age of 91.

While subtly shaping what is an acceptable narrative for an American artist to engage with, the political and military establishment learned another thing following the debacle that was the Vietnam War: near unfettered media access to a theatre of war is a sure way to lose the control of the story. And so no more Philip Jones Griffiths, Don McCullins, and Catherine Leroys roaming the battlefields — the photographers will be embedded, the scenes carefully orchestrated and the war will be beautiful. It mostly worked. Today, a banana duct-taped to a wall is an acceptable piece of art, but we question whether a photojournalist has a right to photograph protesters in a public space.

In fact, recent incidents of obstructing photojournalists from doing their jobs in the US are only a continuation of a trend that’s been going on for some time. In 2008 and 2009, for example, Metropolitan Police Service in London tried to use anti-terrorism legislation to prevent photography in public places and it even produced campaign posters suggesting that a photographer might be a terrorist.

With the launch of major social media platforms in mid and late 2000s, three things happened. The audiences fragmented into a million pieces sliced, diced and squeezed to ensure maximum profit; any resemblance of privacy has disappeared; and the righteous fights once reserved for the pages of obscure academic journals spilt into this fragmented public sphere where they became highly profitable if you happened to own one or more of the social networks that thrive on them.

Our willingness to surrender privacy for the privilege of using social networks is disturbing enough and coupled with mass surveillance in public spaces and de facto voluntary self-surveilance through social media is downright alarming. Given that everybody from private companies to domestic and foreign governments tracks our movement, on-line activities, and even our vital signs, one would think that a few street photographers making photos in public spaces would go more or less unnoticed. But, somehow, photography in public has become suspicious. The Recent op-ed by Jean Son in New York Daily News is but one example of the pressure to control what kind of activity is permisable in public space. As it is now, almost anywhere in Europe and North America anybody has a right to photograph anything and anybody in public space. This demand to privatize public spaces is something corporate world has been working on for some time. In her book about walking, Wanderlust, Rebecca Solnit writes about the attempts to privatize sidewalks in Las Vegas in order to control the kind of activities that can take place in front of the casinos. It would be a shame if a patron had to encounter a proselytizer, or, heavens forbid, a union organizer.

The problem with academic approach to ethics applied to documentary photography is that it leaves most of the important things out. I am not arguing here that photographers, no matter how well-known they are, should not be called out in instances of alleged sexual misconduct, abuse and child abuse as we have seen recently. Those are crimes, not ethical problems and should be treated as such. Yes, we need to talk about editorial responsibility in commissioning and using a wide range of photographic voices and the way that leading photography organizations are managed and operated. There are elements of ethics there, but it all has little bearing on how one goes out and makes photographs.

A code of ethics or a code of conduct is about how you as an individual photographer go about telling the story of what is unfolding in front of you in a way that is respectful and true to the circumstances you are in. The code of ethics is not a shield you can hide behind once you check all the boxes on it. It is most certainly not a shield you can hide behind when a situation makes YOU uncomfortable because it challenges the way you think about something or someone. John Berger once wrote that “a photograph bears witness to a human choice being exercised.” And it is not a single choice. It is not just a choice of what to photograph and when — that is, obviously, a part of it — but it is also about recording the choices made in front of you: did the people in front of you choose to be kind or did they choose to cause pain, did they choose to show compassion or calousness. That is what makes photographic ethics so complex and why I, as a photographer, do not care all that much what anybody else who was not there with me has to say about the ethics of any particular photograph I made.

Lately, documentary photographers, just like academics and art photographers, have been describing their work as “collaborative projects.” Well, yes, every documentary project is in some way a collaborative project, but what they mean is that they have somehow surrendered some portion of control of the photographic process to the people they photograph. I sometimes wonder if photographers who declare their projects to be a “collaboration” think (much like researchers who do community-based research as if there were any other kind) that this absolves them of the responsibility inherent in creating a documentary body of work. Being “collaborative” does not come with a saintly halo.

Even collaborations are not enough any more in the age of fragmented audiences and on-line cliques because in order to sustain the group dynamics, the ante needs to be upped constantly. The easiest way to do that is to question whether the photographer has “the right” to tell a particular story, whether this is her story to tell. Often, the notion of cultural appropriation is wrapped around those questions as well. As a photographer (or a writer, or an artist) you have the right to tell whatever story you want. How you tell it matters, but it is yours to tell. This notion that we are allowed to tell only our own stories is probably not surprising in the age of the selfie. What a sad existence that would be if the only person you can meaningfully engage with is yourself.

There is another problem with demanding that the right people tell the right stories. It ultimately reinforces the poverty of voices and experiences we can access through documentary photography storytelling. It is not clear at all who is supposed to do a documentary work on rural homelessness, or opioid crisis or the plight of health workers exhausted by the relentless COVID-19 infections. Is a nurse suppose to grab a camera and fire off a few selfies after another 24-hour shift? What is she supposed to do with those photographs afterwards? Figure out how to pitch them to the New York Times in her spare time? This shifting of responsibility to people who are already struggling to have their voices made public in the name of representational purity is simply a mindless trick for scoring social media points and does nothing to broaden our understanding of the world we live in.

Calling out documentary photographers for real and imagined ethical transgressions is fun, it may be good for growing the number of your followers and it may even give you a sense of purpose and power, but one thing that it doesn’t do is diminish your responsibility to engage with work honestly. That is not a photographer’s responsibility. It is yours. Photographers can spend years, decades, working on difficult stories. Darcy Padilla and her remarkable Family Love project, which was 21 years in the making, come to mind. No project is perfect, but every project is the product of a photographer’s work and dedication to the subject. As viewers, we can question choices and search for answers, but we should never forget that the story exists because somebody spend a long time figuring out how to tell it. Ultimately, if one doesn’t like how a story is told, there is nothing to stop one from doing it better.

So go out and tell whatever stories you want, but do it as well as you can. If you can be kind, always be kind. Be honest with yourself and the people you photograph. Contemplate the choices in front of you and then make the one that feels right. There will always be critics. The truth is that you actually don’t have to engage with them at all. They don’t matter, but stories do and once they are out there, they belong to all of us. As Thomas King likes to say, you can take this story and do whatever you want with it, forget it if you want, “but don’t say in years to come that you would have lived your life differently if you have only heard this story. You heard it now.” ✖︎

EDIT: Added an additional link to a Ryan Briggs article on August 15, 2023.