Ethics of Images

In my ongoing search for blog fodder, I stumbled onto the blog of photojournalist Carrie Niland and a post she wrote last Thursday called "ethics and toning."

I always find that ethical issues jump out at me. This is partially attributed to my current enrollment in Journalism Ethics and Issues, a senior requirement for my journalism degree. The other part of it is that I find ethics to be like philosophy: they are both topics that can spark lengthy and heated debates that generally never reach definitive resolutions because there are no definitive answers. Perhaps the part of me that likes this is the part of me that is drawn to the law, being able to see and understand both sides of an issue. Even things that seem black and white are usually a shade of gray.

So, what is this Niland post about? It's about photojournalism ethics. We've had some extensive conversations about photojournalism ethics in my class, and it is much more a world of gray then printed word or broadcast journalism.

Written journalism can be pretty cut and dry when it comes to printing a quote from someone: don't change their words. Of course, then there is an issue of removing words, changing tense, etc.; however, this tends to be indicated by ellipses or brackets, and the whole point is to leave the meaning and context of the quote intact. And facts are facts; if it was raining, you don't say it was sunny. It seems pretty simple.

The problem is that so much of photography is about perception. "Truth" or "fact" are a subjective thing in an image. Who is to say exactly what shade of blue the sky was; every camera is going to capture it differently, and every printer is going to use a slightly different mixture of ink. Even more concrete things are uncertain. In a printed quote, a journalist might remove a word for the quote to work grammatically. In an image, a photographer might want to remove a signpost because it looks like it's coming out of someone's head. In both cases, something about it just isn't right, and the change doesn't significantly alter the context. But it quickly becomes a slippery slope.

The particular issue discussed in the Niland post seems pretty cut and dry to me, but that's because it was portrayed as news (capturing the reality of the event) and was obviously doctored using photo editing software. Due to copyrights, etc., you can click the link above to see the images in that posting.

All in all, as I said, I find these ethical situations interesting, even when it may seem as though there is a clear(er) answer. But I think Niland creates a good conversation - some of the comments are quite lengthy - about a valuable topic. And in a time when technology is more pervasive and more advanced, creating difficulty in spotting manipulations and fakes, this is certainly something of which people need to be aware.