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As a photographer, I think it's particularly important to think about what photographs are saying. How they'll be interpreted. There's an ethical responsibility for me to consider how a photograph might end up affecting the people or places I photograph, even if in the answer in the end is "I don't know." I think there is a place for photography that exists in an ethical gray area, but it should always be well-considered photography.
As for images in general, I wish people could be in the habit of *always* asking, when they see any image, what's the cultural context of this? What is really being documented? Whose purposes are served by the various understandings?
This Week in Photography: the famous Vietnam war photograph of General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong man.
As for images in general, I wish people could be in the habit of *always* asking, when they see any image, what's the cultural context of this? What is really being documented? Whose purposes are served by the various understandings?
This Week in Photography: the famous Vietnam war photograph of General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong man.
The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them; but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths. … What the photograph didn’t say was, ‘What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American people?“
-Photographer Eddie Adams