ethics

The ethical dimensions of artificial intelligence (AI) image colorization were recently brought to public attention when several historical images were altered using digital algorithms.

Ethics in photography is a topic that just keeps popping up. Whether it’s the latest dish on Magnum, or an argument about photographing the homeless, some days it seems you can’t turn around without stumbling across another disagreement.

In 1976 while rummaging through an attic of Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology in search of old museum publications, editorial assistant Lorna Condon opened a drawer in a wooden cabinet. Inside, she found a number of flat leather cases which contained a series of daguerreotypes of partially and fully nude Black people.

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.

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.

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.

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?