Photography and Ethics

An exploration of some issues relating to photography, ethics and my own practice.

page five

There is an interesting similarity between Stanley Forman's photograph of Diana Bryant and more recent photographs of suicide victims falling to their deaths.

For example, in early 2006 Katherine Ward was photographed as she prepared to leap from a hotel window and again as she actually fell. The photographer, Jon Bushell, just happened to be in the right place at the right time. He made the decision to take the photographs - and to submit them for syndication. The Matrix picture agency distributed them, and some newspapers, including The Times and The Sun, decided to publish them. Who, in this continuum, was still acting ethically and who was not?

Peter Cole, writing in The Independent shortly afterwards, argued that the people responsible for publishing photographs portraying personal trauma should "be driven by some basic standards, rather than the ability to think up some spurious post hoc justification" He goes on to question where it is we draw the line on what it is acceptable to publish: "We would not consider publishing a picture of a mangled corpse after a motor accident; but it is acceptable to show the clothed and unbroken body dropping through the air to its death? Are there "wholesome" images and those that are not? The pile of washed-up drowned bodies on the beach after the tsunami? The still from the beheading video of a hostage? One form of death defensible to be set in front of our readers, but not another?"

The significant difference between Forman's image of a woman and her child plummeting from a broken fire escape and Bushell's photograph of a woman committing suicide is, for me at least, one of outcome, or purpose. The Diana Bryant image had a positive effect on fire safety legislation - things happened after its publication which made life a little safer for people living in tall buildings. What good will come from the Katherine Ward photo? Will fewer people commit suicide? I doubt it. So this image teeters on the voyeuristic and exploitative side of photojournalism rather than the Utilitarianism approach of working for the common good.

References

all sites accessed and working 11/01/06