“To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.” ― Susan Sontag, On Photography Ethical Deliberations in Photography Ethics is about the moral principles that people work with. Societies, countries, groups all have ways of deciding what is right and wrong. 'Correctness' or acceptable conduct is one of the outcomes of ethics. from Shutter Release, April 2010 Ethics are principles reflecting the values of a society—guidelines for its members to treat each other fairly according to accepted ideals. Needless to say, reality often differs markedly from the ideals, but civilizations, organizations and informal groups of all kinds have understandings of ethical conduct. Within a group, ethics may be broadly accepted in general terms, but issues arise in their interpretation and application. Ethics can be especially contentious with changing times and diversities of culture and technology. In the practice of photography, ethical issues tend to arise over the nature of creativity, representation, ownership, profit and service, often confused by the application of new technologies and exacerbated by cultural preferences or political ideology, and of course individual personality and ambition. Steve Lewis lead f8 today in discussing this huge and important area in photography. Below is Steve's narrative..edited "In light of what a sensitive, empathetic, and compassionate group we are, I would like to us to explore how "the line" that separates action from observation, which we have spoken about before in relation to photojournalists, has confronted and impacted each of us. Have we seen something tragic and decided to photograph it? If not, how might we react? As examples, I will bring several such photos from my trips to Haiti and South Africa." Steve's narrative continues...
"The question posed was, "where do we, as photographers, draw an ethical line as to what is acceptable practice when photographing people, particularly when the act of taking the picture could amount to an invasion of that person's privacy. If we bend our ethics to our advantage, then how do we justify the "risk" of violating a subject? The discussion expressed a variety of points of view, and triggered some self-reflection among us. We agreed that this topic is worth returning to in the future for further exchange of thoughts and ideas." Steve's final slide... See it, shoot it? / To show/share, or not? / Art or documentation? / Right or wrong? There was lot's of discussion I could not capture in my blog post...you had to be there to appreciate the discussion and leadership of Steve in this issue...we will come back to this subject at a later date. Below are some links to additional info on the subject of ethics http://www.iconicphoto.com/pdf/ethical_issues_in_photography_0305.pdf https://petapixel.com/tag/ethics/ https://petapixel.com/2017/04/03/the-ethics-of-photojournalism/ http://web.mit.edu/drb/Public/PhotoThesis/ https://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/10/16/staging-manipulation-ethics-photos/
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