The Ethics of Photojournalism in the Digital Age

Miguel Franquet Santos Silva, Scott Eldridge II

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138586291
• eBook ISBN: 9780429997631
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Delving into the complexities of contemporary reportage, this book draws from moral philosophy and histories of photojournalism to understand the emergence of this distinct practice and discuss its evolution in a digital era.

In arguing that the digitization of photography obliges us to radically challenge some of the traditional conceptions of press photography, this book addresses the historic opposition between artistic and journalistic photographs, showing and challenging how this has subtly inspired support for a forensic approach to photojournalism ethics. The book situates this debate within questions of relativism over what is 'moral', and normative debates over what is 'journalistic', alongside technical debates as to what is 'possible', to underpin a discussion of photojournalism as an ethical, moral, and societally important journalistic practice. Including detailed comparative analyses of codes of ethics, examination of controversial cases, and a study of photojournalism ethics as applied in different newsrooms, the book examines how ethical principles are applied by the global news media and explores the potential for constructive dialogue between different voices interested in pursuing the best version of photojournalism.

A targeted, comprehensive and engaging book, this is a valuable resource for academics, researchers and students of photojournalism, as well as philosophy, communications and media studies more broadly.

1

Introduction

This book is about news photographs and photojournalism. It is interested in their place in our media and what underpins our understanding of ethical photography. It explores photography’s unique place in our social worlds, and in particular highlights the complexities of doing ethical journalistic work when it comes to depictions of human suffering. In recent years, there have been few more obvious examples of this than when, in September 2015, the body of Alan Kurdi washed up on a beach in Bodrum, Turkey. He had drowned after the boat in which he was traveling along with his family and 23 others overturned. They were trying to reach the Greek island of Kos after fleeing war-torn Syria. As soon as the photo of his body was published, discussions quickly sprung up as people rushed to debate the moral legitimacy of publishing the photographs of this young boy’s body.

In the days that followed many national and international newspapers dedicated their editorials to the photograph, taken by Nilüfer Demir, aiming to justify their decisions to publish it. This took different angles. Some had published it on the front page and others on the inside of their newspapers, some only on their websites. Others not at all. Why so many different approaches, and with each approach, a different defense?

Well, for one, when it comes to situations such as this, there is no straightforward rule for newspapers to follow. Many professional codes of ethics acknowledge that publishing such a photo may serve a greater public interest, and so newspapers see the public’s right to be informed as prevailing over any right to individual privacy for Alan Kurdi. For argument’s sake, evaluating whether or not to publish in these terms does not raise many objections, as “public interest” is the ultimate mission of journalism. However, looked at differently – case-by-case, and specifically in this case when weighing the decision to publish the image of Kurdi – when we try and apply such a general rule to specific cases, we find that codes can fall short in their support, and decisions which are made can be deeply problematic.

For others, publishing this photograph is a necessary act, and the decision to publish it is immediately justifiable not just due to its public interest, but also in terms of its extraordinary power to move readers’ consciences and prompt action. More than any other text and more than many other image, the shocking impact of a photo, and particularly this photo of Alan, lying face down on the beach, had the capacity to move people. This is, in fact, the position of the photographer herself: “If the picture makes Europe change its attitudes towards refugees, then it was right to publish it. I have taken many photographs of the refugee drama and none had such an effect on the public consciousness” (Küpeli, 2015). From this position, the right decision around publication depends on the anticipated benefits that may result from the publication of the photograph. It may be a prompt to action and lead to change.

For others still, the publication of this photograph was ethically indefensible, and withholding its publication neither compromised the public’s right to be informed, nor would publishing it enhance their grasp of information on the topic of migration. For those making this argument, other photos could be used instead, such as the one showing a Turkish officer cradling the body of Kurdi in his arms, which some newspapers chose to publish on their front pages (including El País in Spain, the Daily Mail, Sun, Daily Mirror, The Times and the Guardian in the UK, and the Washington Post in the United States, among others). While also shocking, in this photograph the face of Alan is not visible, concealing his identity. But is it as effective in raising people’s awareness? Can it also serve to mobilize political action? Does it tell Kurdi’s story in full?

These photographs step into a contentious debate, and invigorate a discussion over whether or not news and images can transform, by themselves, social and political reality. Certainly, this has been challenged by different authors. Perlmutter (1998), for instance, has argued that it would be an exaggeration to credit iconic photographs with the power to determine international political action, and Moeller (1999) has argued that the widespread indifference with which citizens relate to social and political injustice could be explained by a compassion fatigue effect resulting from the overexposure to graphic and violent content. Instead of driving political action, they would generate the opposite reaction. According to this argument, there is no need to show the photograph of the body of Alan to raise readers’ awareness of the desperate situation that many Syrian refugees are experiencing. Moreover, the publication of shocking images such as this could instead lead readers to become insensitive, and numb to migrants’ plight, and would contribute instead to accelerating the horror.

Regardless the recognition of the value of these theories, theories which denounce the abusive and illegitimate use of images of pain and suffering for merely commercial purposes, the question of whether or not, in the current political context, the publication of the photograph of Alan Kurdi would be justified in terms of its exceptional nature seems to have no categorical answer. Studies on the effects, political or otherwise, that media are capable of having on society have always struggled enormously to isolate the relative responsibility of a specific media form – a photograph, a newspaper article or a television report – from the complex flow of other media content and the range of other factors shaping a particular historical and cultural context that also influence reactions to news events (Perse, 2001; McQuail, 2010).

Part of the challenge that has confronted making sense of these factors is the sometimes-dueling dynamics of conviction, and a certitude that one’s decision is the right one, and responsibility, which can offer a sobering counter-response to conviction. In Politics as a Vocation, Max Weber argues that the exercise of politics – and the press has an undeniably political function in this dialogue – cannot be exclusively guided by an ethics of conviction that remains totally indifferent to the consequences of the decisions taken. This position usually characterizes the moralist who presumes to live in a perfect world. Weber argues, however, one cannot also be completely insensitive to these same convictions, since this would imply a cynical behavior that would justify any means to reach the desired goals. And it is precisely the fact that finding the perfect balance between conviction and responsibility does not depend on the application of a particular scientific formula that the exercise of politics entails a genuine vocation (Weber, 2004, p. 92).

To further complicate matters, the photograph in question shows the death of a child, and this draws to the surface our ambivalent relationship with death, as Sigmund Freud states in Thoughts for the Times on War and Death (cf. Freud, 1996). We know that death is life’s natural outcome, but we always refer to it as an accident: “We show a patent inclination to do without death, to eliminate it from life. We have attempted to silence it” (Freud, 1996, p. 2110). Death is, therefore, the cause of the feeling of guilt and remorse that, according to Freud, are at the origin of ethics and religion. Our behavior when we encounter photographs of death reveals this same ambivalence. On the one hand, it could be said that photos of dead bodies hold a form of fascination for us, a morbid one, that captures our attention, and so we see shocking photos as ways to increase readership. On the other hand, however, we condemn the commercialization of their publication as an assault on people’s dignity with the same intensity with which we wish to see them, declaring that death should be a private matter.

However, it is not always motivations of either business or exploitation that have driven the long, close relationship photography has had with death. As Susan Sontag (2003) wrote, photography has a greater and incomparable authority than the written word when it comes to “conveying the horror of mass-produced death.” According to Sontag, it was the photographs taken in April and the beginning of May 1945 in the concentration camps at Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, and Dachau which demonstrated the superiority of photographs over more complex narratives to define, and not only record, the most abominable of human realities (Sontag, 2003, p. 24).

The controversy generated by the use of photography in the press is as old as published photography itself. The suspicion that what is shown may not correspond exactly to what happened has accompanied photojournalism since its inception. Roger Fenton, considered one of the first war reporters, was accused of promoting an extremely bloody picture of the Crimean war. Yet, even then technical limitations and many editorial restrictions meant that the photographs he published in the 1850s in the Illustrated London News failed to reflect the full horror of the war, as he had to stage photographs due to long exposures, and try to retroactively create the battlefield scenes. However, staging was not the only source of controversy to affect press photography. Even then, photography raised questions around intrusion into people’s private lives; this would become a lucrative business as technologies improved. From the moment exposure times were reduced and pocket cameras were introduced in the 1930s, the intrusion into private spaces made such work a viable source of revenue. Perhaps more fundamentally, as technologies improved even further, the ease with which the content of photographs could be altered without leaving a trace of the editing process led to new opportunities and with these opportunities, new challenges. At once strengthened by the advent of computers and the digitization of photography in the 1980s, photography found that the digital age started calling into question the referential and indexical value of photography that has always formed the basis of its credibility. It was no longer necessary to assume that a photograph was a photograph of something that exists somewhere else, with digital photographs there needn’t be a predicate – the photograph itself was something.

For journalism as a decidedly informative aspect of our societies, this poses significant challenges. However, we argue that the relationship between journalism as a field and photojournalism as an informative practice has always been in tension. When we consider written information – textual news, in this case – there is a well-established set of characteristics that we associate more or less consensually with good journalism: good news should be truthful, rigorous, balanced, and fair, and should respect people’s privacy and dignity. Without these attributes, journalism risks losing its credibility, which is indispensable in order for journalism to achieve one of its fundamental missions: to keep people informed about issues relating to their everyday lives.

But what happens in the case of photographs? In what sense could it be said that a photo is true, or that a photograph is rigorous or balanced and fair? Or, objective – to engage with this stubborn paradigmatic value in journalism (Schudson, 2001). As images and words refer to reality differently, it is perfectly legitimate to ask whether the basic attributes that qualify good news should be the same as those that qualify a good press photograph and whether text and image should share the same fundamental mission. We aim to wrestle with these questions here in this volume.

From a semiotic point of view, the relationship between words and the objects to which they refer is, as a rule, arbitrary. In other words, it is not the nature of the objects that motivates or determines the form (signifier) of linguistic signs. The relation between most words and things is purely conventional, i.e. the result of an agreement between the speakers. In his Course on General Linguistics, Saussure states that it is the arbitrary character of the linguistic sign that makes verbal language the most complex and universal symbolic system. It can, then, be considered the paradigmatic model of all other symbolic systems (Saussure, 1959, p. 68). It is along the same lines that Paul Watzlawick et al. argue, in Pragmatics of Human Communication, that (digital) verbal language, by virtue of its arbitrary and conventional nature, is the best qualified symbolic system to communicate rigorously and precisely (Watzlawick et al., 2011).

Photographs, by contrast, represent their objects analogically, by virtue of their similarity to the things they reference. Photographs represent objects because, under certain aspects, they seem like them. In this regard, what photographs represent is not established by convention. For Watzlawick et al., what analogue signs may lose in determination and rigor, they gain in their capacity to move people. In this sense, when compared to words, photographs not only relate to objects differently, but also relate to people differently.

In terms of these differences, this prompts us to ask: Should the credibility of the press photograph be judged according to the same criteria used to evaluate a written document? Is it legitimate to expect that images can assume the same informative functions demanded of words? What relationship should press photography have with artistic photography? What attributes should a photograph have so that it may be considered a good press photograph?

This book sets out to address these questions by exploring the ethos of photojournalism from a number of angles. It incorporates the analysis of a set of documents in which the ethical-moral reflection on journalism and photojournalism is conceptualized, by focusing on the codes of ethics, stylebooks, internal guidelines, and academic books concerning photojournalism. In doing so, we will reflect upon what a press photograph should be across press associations, articles published in specialized journals and professional forums, and through the historical investigations of Dona Schwartz (1992, 1999, 2002, 2003) and others. The aim is to, on the one hand, analyze the foundations upon which the predominant concept of press photography is grounded and, on the other, to challenge its theoretical legitimacy and practical utility.

This approach does not disregard the distance that exists between the (normative) theory of press photography and photojournalism in practice. Nor does it ignore the fact that the practice of photojournalism also helps forge its professional identity. In other words, the ethos of photojournalism is also the result of the understanding reached by all those that are more or less directly involved in the activity of taking, selecting, and editing photographs and organizing how they are shown and distributed. There is no need to carry out any scientific study to confirm that the practice of photojournalism is plural and diverse. The question posed is: What relation should the much-sought-after ethos of photojournalism maintain with the various ways of understanding and practicing it?

This is no insignificant question. In fact, as highlighted by various authors, among them John Merrill (1974), the ethical reflection on photojournalism should not lose sight of the danger of proposing a concept of journalism that threatens its principle and fundamental condition: freedom. In this regard, proposing a set of ethical principles aimed at the professional practice should not have as its purpose the reduction of various ways of saying or showing reality. Rather, the opposite: its diverse and plural expression should be celebrated and promoted. For Merrill, this criticism can be extended to the teaching of journalism and the imposition of profession entry criteria. Either would help legitimize a set of models standardized to look at and understand reality and to foster uniformed ways of reporting it. (This poses its own risk; as Susan Moeller, writing in 2004, demonstrated, biased media coverage of the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq could in part be linked to the uncritical applicat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction
• 2. General ethics and applied ethics
• 3. Journalism ethics and photojournalism ethics
• 4. Origins of photojournalism ethics
• 5. Digital era and analogue conventions
• 6. Phenomenology and the representation of the other
• 7. The distant other
• 8. Improper distance: The “refugee crisis” presented by two newsrooms
• 9. Conclusions: Going forward, ethically
• Index