This is an excerpt from a piece I wrote in response to a question about ethics in image making for a day of study at London’s Tate Britain, an event I co-led with Hilary Roberts of the Imperial War Museum and photographer and educator Anthony Luvera.
You can learn more about the event and read Hilary Roberts’ and Anthony Luvera’s responses on Magnum’s website.
What are some of the ethical issues you have dealt with in your own work, and where do you think the field is on ethics at present?
Questions of ethics in their multiple forms are ever-present for any photographer working in the “concerned” realm — whether in documentary or non-fiction, journalism or in art, whether the work is made for reportage, the press, or a museum or gallery. As I titled one of my presentations in the Tate Study Day, I’m “guilty as charged” — on matters of representation, intervention, aestheticization and censorship.
The question of representation is often on my mind when I’m researching for a project and before I begin making the work. I ask myself: is this my story to tell? How am I portraying this issue, these people, this place? There aren’t always easy answers and one still has to make split-second decisions sometimes while in field, but one does one’s best.
As for the golden rule of “do not intervene (with the scene)”, I broke it 100 per cent when I worked on the story of “Black Lung” disease in China. I documented what turned out to be the final three years of the life of gold miner He Quangui, and became more than a fly on the wall in his home in the remote mountains of Shaanxi, got very personally close to him, his wife and their son. Six months into the project, his wife called me in tears at 4am one day and wailed “He’s dying, you have to help him.” I raised funds through a Chinese NGO, flew out there to pick him up, took him to hospital, and was his secondary caregiver for a tearful and harrowing week in hospital as his wife could not make the trip there. That’s intervention… one that helped him live another three years. I thought “human being first, photographer second”; and if we’re purportedly trying to bring about social change for the community we’re documenting and when faced with the task of helping one of them, we didn’t do it, it’s unconscionable. I was then open about the fact that I’d intervened, with editors who were interested to publish the story or curators who were keen to exhibit the work. I spoke openly about it in interviews too.
One of the biggest changes for me when I quit a decade-long career as a writing journalist and foreign correspondent for The Straits Times to become a freelance documentary photographer focused on long-form, self-directed projects was that I could choose not to be “objective”. In a newspaper, there’s the notion of impartiality, of being objective, but in doing long-form documentary work of my own, I’m following an issue or a person/subject for years because I care deeply about it, or it makes me mad, or upset, and I have something to say about it — and not necessarily to represent all sides of it. I don’t strive for “objectivity” even if I try to be fair (at least in text). Just our presence as documentarians changes reality. When photographers (including Don McCullin whose retrospective at the Tate this Study Day was organized around) talk about being a dispassionate observer just bearing witness, I understand what they mean, but looking at it with a finer lens, it’s not really possible in reality. Any sort of representation is subjective anyway… the minute you raise the camera, there’s manipulation involved — but that’s a topic well covered by scholarly critics of photography!
Aestheticization — an old chestnut that gets thrown at photographers and photography. We make bad things look “too beautiful”. In making my series “Most People Were Silent” on nuclear landscapes of North Korea and the United States, the choice of mood, color palette and an overall aestheticized look for the images was intentional. I got an email from a collector asking, “How does it feel to make something so horrific look so beautiful?” My reasoning is that if the aesthetics are a hook, a way in to opening a conversation on this highly-polarizing, tired issue, then the work does something. If I’d photographed nuclear victims’ burnt skin, deformed babies etc. yet again, I doubt people who were pro-nuclear in the first place would contemplate stepping into the gallery from the get-go. I don’t have the answers but am experimenting with different strategies of speaking to people across the divide — and I think we need ever more of that in these polarized times — rather than shutting down the conversation before we even begin.
Overall, it seems to me there’s a lot of concern over issues of ethics in our field in recent times. Ethics cover such a broad range of issues, across the making of images, their distribution and their consumption. In the documentary genre, the aspects that seem to generate most concern of late are: representation and the lack of diversity (in both photographer and the photographed), manipulation in the process and post-production of images, for instance. In the case of diversity — in gender and geography — and how we represent the “other”, I think the industry is very conscious of the need for change, but we might still have a long way to go… Apart from those concerns, the other issues are not new, even if there seems to be more buzz about them. These often stem from the “truth claim” of the photograph. On manipulation, I think setting up pictures — and passing them off as found moments — is much more difficult to find out than post-production manipulation for which there is forensic tools. There are rules out there like the World Press Photo’s which try to police what’s allowed or not. I think those rules try to set some sort of benchmark for that genre of work. Documentary forms themselves have evolved and some would say setting up or manipulating the imagery gets us closer to the truth or more evocative of the intended emotion, action or social change. I think that’s all ok and we do need to evolve to find forms that better represent our changing world; just be open about it. If a photographer still wants to submit their work for competitions like World Press or distribute their work for reportage use, then those are the current rules that the industry broadly holds on to. But one can always opt out of that award system (which is itself not unproblematic) and those methods of distribution. One just needs to be honest and transparent about one’s intention and process, and also choose the appropriate distribution channels for one’s work.
Issues of ethics in image-making touch us all these days as we live in a highly visual culture. Whether we’re makers, distributors or consumers of images — and we today often play at least two of those three roles — they were ever-present and call on us to reflect more deeply on our actions and choices.