Dear Mr. Burnett,
I have some concerns I’d like to address in your recent open letter regarding the Photo Bill of Rights (BoR). I am a 36-year-old white female editorial and commercial photographer. I am a member of APA and a Houston chapter board member for ASMP.
World-renowned photojournalist David Burnett recently published an open letter to the National Press Photographers Association in response to the recent debates surrounding photojournalistic ethics and the controversial new Photo Bill of Rights that calls for, among other things, consent from subjects in public spaces.
Fox News is being slammed for breaching journalism ethics after it published Photoshopped news photos of protests in Seattle. The outlet has pulled the misleading photos and apologized.
Editor’s note: Veteran photojournalist Yunghi Kim (@yunghi) sent me the following thoughts after the publication of my article about the ethics of showing protestors’ faces.
In the midst of global protests in support of #BlackLivesMatter, the Poynter Institute caused a ruckus within the photojournalism industry last week with the provocatively titled “Photographers are being called on to stop showing protestors’ faces. Should they?”
You want to know how to film police misconduct safely and ethically? Teen Vogue will teach you how. Wait… what do you mean Teen Vogue? The fashion and beauty magazine targeted at 18 - 24-year-old American girls? Yes, that’s the one.
A photo showing crowds packing a beach in California during the state's COVID-19 lockdown sparked controversy this past week and led to the area's beaches getting shut down. Now that photo itself is at the center of a heated debate: many are saying that it's misleading because it was shot with a telephoto lens.
Facial recognition is an incredibly useful consumer tool for organizing our burgeoning photo albums. Companies like Google and Apple have slowly integrated machine learning algorithms into their consumer photo products, which allow you to search by keywords without the need for manual tagging, or to simply click on a face to see more photos of that person.
It frustrates me to see so many fake wildlife photographs of amphibians and reptiles on social media. That's because those staged photos of captive animals in unnatural positions and situations go viral on a regular basis, and this “success” can inspire other people to follow them in their footsteps.
A photojournalist has apologized after being accused of faking an award-winning series of photos that purportedly show hitmen in Honduras carrying out violent acts.
GQ ran a story last week about a group of "tech titans" making a "pilgrimage" to small Italian village to visit luxury designer Brunello Cucinelli. The article's lead image was a group photo of the attendees, but something looked off...
African Geographic has announced that photographer who recently won its 2019 Photographer of the Year award has been disqualified due to photo-manipulation.
Unlike most types of photography, photojournalism abides a more stringent set of ethical guidelines because truth is paramount to accurate reporting. Many newspapers enforce their own ethical journalism guidelines, which tend to focus on retouching and the use of photo illustration techniques (e.g. compositing, timelapse, panoramic, etc).
A group of boys in Baraboo, WI assembled for a junior prom photo and posed with a Nazi salute. One of the boys posted the image to Twitter with the caption “We even got the black kid to throw it up.” In the midst of public outrage, it was revealed that a professional photographer not only took the image but directed them to “wave goodbye.”
While most commercial photographers know about copyright laws and the use of a model for their images, it seems the answer isn’t so clear when it comes to travel photography. If you’re traveling the world with your camera, what laws apply for you and for your subject?
With the recent polemics surrounding a certain image that won a photography competition this week, I feel like we need to talk about travel photography. About people photography, in our case. And to set up boundaries as to what’s acceptable in both cases. Honestly, in my opinion, it’s a matter of common sense – but it seems that’s not enough. We still witness some shocking scenes in the world of travel photography these days.
In covering the terrorist attack on a Nairobi hotel that killed at least 21 people by Shahab extremists, The New York Times decided to publish an image of a bullet-riddled body taken by Khalil Senosi. Photo Twitter was outraged, and Poynter wrote about the “hard choice” the NYT made regarding the selection.
One of my images has been subjected to criticism and scrutiny in a way that none of my other work ever has. The photograph in question is of a scene in London, Chinatown; a man reaches into a sewer while shouting about how someone threw his needles down there.
Here's a thought-provoking 9-minute video by UK photographer Jamie Windsor regarding the ethics of street photography.
One of the cardinal rules of documentary wildlife photography and filmmaking is to not interfere with the natural course of events in the scenes and situations you're trying to capture on camera. A BBC wildlife film crew decided to break that rule by coming to the rescue of trapped penguins.