36. Photography & Ethics

When you paint a picture, you immediately have the opportunity to change what you see, to make it more ideal, less ideal, more or less realistic, to capture a likeness or to ignore the likeness, manipulate the colors, and on and on. Photos don’t do that, at least not automatically. They copy reality in precise detail. This raises ethical issues, especially when the subject is a person. As the philosopher Susan Sontag wrote in her essay, On Photography, a photo may “. . . presume, intrude, trespass, distort, exploit, and, at the farthest reach of metaphor, assassinate – all activities that . . . can be conducted from a distance, and with some detachment.” In other words, photography has the power to traumatize people.

Consider people whose job involves searching the internet for the worst, most disturbing images possible, in order to keep them off of "safe searches". Web browsers have hired thousands of people to do this job, and many of these employees have reported fits of depression as a result.

So, before taking a photo, and before making it public, you should consider if those in the photo want their picture taken, whether you’re invading their privacy, whether it could hurt their reputations, careers, or family lives, etc, or whether you’re simply trying to profit off of someone else’s misery. And that's a hard question to answer - does someone's pain and suffering define a crucial moment in history that needs to be remembered? Or is it just someone's private life that you're invading?

Another issue has to do with desensitization. When people get used to violent, graphic, or otherwise disturbing imagery, there is a fear it could change them, making them less caring, more indifferent, and it could change their expectations, especially as film special effects and CGI graphics become more and more realistic. 

This kind of imagery can be especially dangerous and triggering for people (especially children) with psychopathic tendencies, who may find it stimulating. There have been cases of people seeing some awful act in a film or videogame, and then acting it out in real life. This raises the question, does the artist share some blame for the resulting tragedy? It's a challenge because, whether or not these tragedies could have been avoided, or if the assailants would have simply committed some other atrocity - it's the kind of question you'd can't ever answer, you'd need a crystal ball.