Rethinking the ethical judgement of photography
Introducing a year-long series of articles on truth, ethics and storytelling in photography
Ethical considerations, judgments, and actions seem, at first glance, to be straightforward.
At a recent workshop run by the anti-slavery charity Unseen UK, participants were asked if they were involved in slavery, directly or indirectly. Most people were. If you buy cheap clothes, have a phone or laptop, smoke marijuana, or visit nail bars, you might be involved in modern slavery and tacitly supporting it.
In this context, the ethical considerations are obvious. If you are really concerned about slavery, you can start to take action by not doing those things. If you are against it, then you should not support it, and if you don’t know where your clothes, your phone, your drugs come from… then you’re as good as supporting it. Similarly, if you are against tax-dodging corporations, the rise of cheap labor, the destruction of local markets, the loss of housing for local people, or the concentration of wealth in a few pockets, then you shouldn’t buy from Amazon, take rides with Uber, or book an Airbnb.
At first consideration, these are not difficult choices to identify and we can judge our ethical omissions and commissions quite easily. Yet they are incredibly different choices to make and very few of us will be able, hand on heart, to say that we live our lives according to the convictions that we think we hold. Those rules are not suited to our modern lives and nearly all of us buy from Apple, Amazon, and H&M. We shouldn’t, but we do. Nearly all of us accept it and we accept our friends who do it. It is actually difficult to act ethically when it comes at a personal cost.
When it comes to photography, however, especially other people’s photography, the challenges of acting ethically are sometimes obscured by the rush to ethical judgment. Our ethical standards are raised to standards that the great martyrs, saints, and philanthropists of times gone by would struggle to meet. One reason for this is it’s easy to do. There is no personal cost.
This was the case for me when I saw that Tyler Hicks’ devastating image of a young Yemeni girl was published in the New York Times last year. The picture is familiar. It shows a 7-year-old girl, her ribs showing, her eyes staring. It is a picture that I identified as fitting into what George Alaghiah called ‘the template photography’ of famine, a template that visually corresponds to the recent visual history of famine.
It’s a very recognizable famine picture. It is made in a particular way, it fits a certain way of understanding the world that did not exist before the invention of the camera.
The girl can be seen as a ‘famine icon’, an example of Susan Sontag’s claim that photography is ‘essentially an act of non-intervention’. Seen in those terms, it is exploitative and othering, an example of a Western photographer going to a far and distant land (but not so distant given that the bombs destroying it aren’t supplied by the West) to deny agency and voice to a young girl who is dying. The criticism could continue on the decontextualized nature of the image, its simplistic appeal to emotion, and the superficial narrative it evidences.
That is part of the story. It certainly was for me. But it is not the whole story because the picture came with a name, Amal Hussain, a name that gave at least some life to the obituaries that followed when Amal died on 26 October 2018. It also came with eyes that, though looking away, were filled with a terrible sadness. Most unusually of all, it came with an editor’s note explaining why the picture was used.
‘This is our job as journalists: to bear witness, to give voice to those who are otherwise abandoned, victimized and forgotten,’ it read. The statement was made in the context of the war in Yemen (where 400,000 children are suffering from severe malnutrition, according to the article) giving rise to one of only two declared famines in the last 20 years. We are simply not accustomed to seeing this kind of image — so common in the 1960s, ’70s, and 80s — anymore.
Perhaps because of this relative rarity, I did not feel ‘numbed’ by this photograph and it is not part of the ‘flood of images’ I have allegedly been bombarded with. Rather, I felt an intense sadness at the plight of the girl. It hit those ‘simplistic’ emotional triggers and it short-circuited me into the wider considerations of the war, its causes, its supporters, its suppliers and everything else connected to what Mike Davis calls the ‘political ecology of famine’. It is a sharp and horrific reintroduction to a once-familiar visual language of famine, something we should see, something that should not be hidden. It’s not the endpoint of that visual language, it is a starting point and that is something that is recognized.
Tyler Hick’s photo is in some way an accusation, not an illustration. The accusation is embedded into the image and the news report it accompanies. It is an accusation against Saudi Arabia, the country fighting the war in Yemen and the interests that have helped them fight that war, and it’s an accusation against their Houthi opposition. Follow the accusation through and it’s an accusation against America for its political alliance, and maybe against the New York Times if you want to follow their editorial policies through to the bitter end.
The medical aid organization Médecins Sans Frontières have the idea ‘témoignage’ to justify their use of images and reports of suffering in their promotional materials. These are the ideas of giving voice, speaking out, advocacy, legitimacy, and resource mobilization. Seen in this light, Tyler Hicks’ image of Amal Hussain becomes a different proposition because it is an example of speaking out, part of the notion of advocacy often found in the tradition of concerned photography. There was also resource mobilization with many messages of ‘How can we help?’ from concerned readers. It is an example of photography, at some fundamental level, doing something good.
With the New York Times publication of the Hick’s photography, I felt two sides of an argument. Depending on which way I looked at it, both made perfect sense. Rather than being a clear-cut case of, in crude polarised terms, being an exploitative image we should be outraged by, or a heroic bearing of witness, it was a little bit of both. Or actually, it was neither of those. It was somewhere in the middle. It was the beginning of a process, not the end of it.
I wondered at this and thought about the absolutes we use to think about, write about, and talk about images. For something so uncertain as photography, we use the definitive language of absolutes, and we get outraged as though outrage is the only response we have to images that we find questionable.
The example of Tyler Hicks’ image does serve a constructive purpose, though. It made me think about the thought that had gone into the picture (the making, the publishing, the captioning, the intent). I thought about the history of images of famine, how the starving are portrayed, whether their voices are ever heard, whether pictures of suffering really do ever have an effect, or if they just serve as a salve for wealthy voyeuristic consciences.
These theoretical considerations are not new. Go back to the 19th century and the idea of the photographer as witness and the use of images to shock were already central to how images were understood. In the 19th century, there are court cases where consent and the staging of images are already being considered, there are colonial-era images from the British-made Madras famine in India where the photographer, William Willoughby Hooper, is questioned for his callous attitude to the dying people he photographed as well as for his aestheticisation of suffering.
His images present the shock surface of the famine. For the ‘political ecology of famine’, you have to look further, perhaps to the top image of sacks of grain lying on the beach in Madras during a a disaster where drought, British economic policies (including the export of grain), and callousness resulted in a famine that cost 5.5 million lives.
There is writing on photography where class, gender, race, and the colonial gaze are considered, and this theory can be found manifested in photographic work both past and present, including in Tyler Hicks’ portrait. The idea of collaboration and agency is also there as is the way in which images are framed and composed, and the role this plays in creating generic images that come with preconceived ideas contained in the very act of composition.
The role of captioning and juxtaposition also matters, as does the citing of work (Matthew Brady’s pictures of war dead were first shown in galleries rather than news publications), and the use of photographs in publications where ownership and political affiliations may flavor the editorial framing of images. How photography is used as soft power or in propaganda and advertising is also important.
Finally, there is the question of who makes work and where they make it. Many of the objections around previous examples of famine photography connect to the ideas of exoticization of the ‘East’ that Edward Said wrote about in Orientalism, ideas which are being re-examined through concepts such as ‘Re-Orientalism’.
That also made me think about the importance of the tone of critique and who is making the work, who the audience is, and the need to recognize that there is more than one way to photograph something. The world is a multi-faceted place and multiple voices need to be heard, something Said argued for in his essays — his was a world of opening things up, not closing things down.
And perhaps most important of all there is the question of how images are sequenced and used to tell the story. Again, though the 19th century saw the rise of the photograph as evidence, there was also the non-literal idea of the photograph as something illustrative of a story, an approach that is finding a reprise in the rise of photography based on fictional narratives. Look at the work of Cristina de Middel, Mohammed Bouroissa, or Kazuma Obara, and we see that the old certainties of photojournalism and documentary photography are being shaken up by more sophisticated renderings of stories in which sequencing, narrative, voice, and the political and cultural history of photographic functions and tropes, are part of the story being told. There is an attempt, in other words, to grasp how we read and understand images and the impact that might have on our historical understanding of the photographically represented world.
The range of ideas is so broad and so complex that at times it can paralyze the more thoughtful photographer into inaction. (The less thoughtful carry on regardless.) This is especially the case when you think that photography serves the publishing industry and is regarded by many as simply a commodity that is paid for, with the demands of advertisers, publishers and editors having precedence over the photographer’s ethical and artistic considerations.
It sometimes seems there are so many ethical considerations that people find it impossible to make direct photojournalistic work. Think too little about the history theory and the danger is you make work that is unsound in many ways. Think too much about the history and theory and you run the risk of hitting a photographic block or paying so much attention to theoretical considerations that your work is of visual interest to only a very limited audience.
This outrage feeds into an imbalanced perspective of photographic theory. The question is how can we short-circuit the outrage into something more balanced, that recognizes both the people and places being photographed, but also the history of visual culture, and the hard realities of media and the publishing industry, realities that include the sensory and emotional consequences of looking at photographs.
Over the coming year, I’ll be writing a series of articles here on Witness. These articles will address some of these questions, but rather than providing a clear set of answers or a prescriptive model of working, they will offer possibilities to open up photographic storytelling, to set out approaches and ideas to how we can tell stories better, how we can involve our subjects better, and how we can increase the power of the photography that we make to tell stories that have the ability to affect, influence and change their audience.
This is the introduction of a year-long series of articles on truth, ethics and storytelling in photography by Colin Pantall. Read the rest of the series by clicking below:
- Beautiful Deaths: On acknowledgement, narrative, and the representation of death in photography
- Hoda Afshar, the individual, and their story
- Remembering the Past, Remembering the Present
- A Guide to Landscape, Power and Climate Change
- Emotional Pictures: Sad Faces, Fake Smiles and Angry Photographers
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