Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before by Michael Fried, and The Civil Contract of Photography by Ariella Azoulay

Argumentation and Advocacy, 2011

2021

Since its invention, photography has been a decisive factor in gestating and deploying a new way of observing, representing, and understanding reality and with it ourselves. Beyond its unique way of making visual information, photography has become the universal medium through which image-makers raise essential questions on human ethics and responsibility. For the 2021 edition, the theme « Ethical shifts in photography » aims to explore the power, the moral principles, and the duties of photography in all its dimensions: the rights of privacy and publicity, cultural representation, appropriation, confidentiality, copyright, intellectual property, sustainability, ethics of wildlife, and nature photography, ethics in photojournalism, and accountability as well as the use of technology that started to challenge the landscape of ethics by doing things to photos without the viewer even being aware. Ethics and photography are two terms that seem distant in the first instance: the first a foreshortening of philosophy, the second an activity sustained by a technological artifact. Photography can ask questions about the ethics of the world, but more likely, the world can ask questions about the ethics of photography. Faced with an overproduction of images by all means and possibilities, today, more than ever is vital to distinguish what is significant and pertinent from what is purely aesthetic. This call brings to the fore the theme of the education and responsibility of seeing. To face a world where images dominate the stage, codes of ethics, quality standards, and critical reading and discernment skills are urgently needed. The need for image-makers and experts to understand and participate in education systems' evolution is more urgent than ever. In this context, this conference aims to bring together image-makers, educators, and experts to provide new perspectives and critically explore and interact with a possible classification to understand practical utilization better. Keywords: photography, education, ethics, responsibility

Southern Communication Journal, 2018

Visual Communication, 2013

To take a photograph is to participate in another person's (or thing's) mortality, vulnerability, mutability.

The “Public” Life of Photographs, 2016

Thierry Gervais, "Introduction," in The “Public” Life of Photographs, ed. Thierry Gervais (Toronto/Cambridge, MA: Ryerson Image Centre; MIT Press, 2016), 1–13. Do we understand a photograph differently if we encounter it in a newspaper rather than a book? In a photo album as opposed to framed on a museum wall? The “Public” Life of Photographs explores how the various ways that photographs have been made available to the public have influenced their reception. The reproducibility of photography has been the necessary tool in the creation of a mass visual culture. This generously illustrated book explores historical instances of the “public” life of photographic images—tracing the steps from the creation of photographs to their reception. The contributors—international curators and scholars from a range of disciplines—examine the emergence of photography as mass culture: through studios and public spaces; by the press; through editorial strategies promoting popular and vernacular photography; and through the dissemination of photographic images in the art world. The contributing authors discuss such topics as how photographic images became objects of appropriation and collection; the faith in photographic truthfulness; Life magazine’s traveling exhibitions and their effect on the magazine’s “media hegemony”; and the curatorial challenges of making vernacular photographs accessible in an artistic environment. Contributors: Geoffrey Batchen, Nathalie Boulouch, Heather Diack, André Gunthert, Sophie Hackett, Vincent Lavoie, Olivier Lugon, Mary Panzer, Joel Snyder

Transformations of media technology bring about new communicative practices that challenge existing ethical and moral norms and demand for continuous renegotiations and reconfirmations of what is considered as responsible and appropriate. So far, the scientific discourse on visual ethics has mostly focused on visual research ethics and the ethical norms within professional fields of mass-media production, neglecting ethical and moral dimensions of mundane visual practices. The paper illustrates the necessity of a critical engagement with “ethical practices” in the field of visual everyday communication, using various areas of conflict regarding the production, distribution, and use of images (e.g. non-consensual photo sharing, reproduction of visual stereotypes in selfies) as starting points for the discussion. Overall, rather than providing normative guidelines for ethical visual behavior, the paper identifies multiple dimensions of ethical considerations and draws implication for future research.

2024

This research analysed 48 interviews with professional photographers that were recorded as part of The Photo Ethics Podcast, an annual podcast series run by the Photography Ethics Centre since 2020. Through a thematic analysis of their insights, this research draws out eight lessons that can help to foster a deeper understanding of the ethical considerations in photography. You can explore these insights in the resulting report, titled “Eight Lessons from The Photo Ethics Podcast.” It is available for download below in six languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish. Alternatively, you can listen to the audio version (English only). This research was supported by the ESRC Impact Acceleration Account at Queen’s University Belfast.

Visual Studies, 2019

I am putting together a collection of my writing completed between 1996 and the present. I write about the role of digital photography on shaping visual identity, ethics and culture in a visual world.

2020

We must have a responsibility to provoke a debate about the times that we are living. There are many questions and we must try to answer them. SebaSTião Salgado, in interview with the author, Gallery 32, London, September 10, 2007 amoNg Salgado'S beST-kNowN imageS are those of the Serra Pelada gold mines (fig. 15). They are at once jarring and wondrous: jarring, because they depict as few other images do the curious geometry of the anonymous when harnessed, like worker ants, to endless productivity; and wondrous, because rising simultaneously from the silver tones of black and white is the energy of the subjects, both individual and collective.1 Despite the odds, the images relay with extraordinary lucidity a sense of the agency of the worker. In light of the preceding chapters, which explored the relevance of the aesthetic in relation to documentary photography and to historical imagination, this chapter traces the crucial question of ethics that flickers in Salgado's photographs. By using the term ethics, I refer not solely to discourses, rules, or actions, but rather to a prediscursive and preconceptual terrain, which conditions and supports such conceptually and linguistically determined responses to photographs. In con