For this week’s discussion, we will be looking at the ethics of photojournalism. For this discussion, you will first need to read the assigned chapter in The Cruel Radiance and then watch both Documentaries in this week’s materials provided.
Use the reading to guide your response to the following question: Are the photographs of James Nachtwey and Dorothea Lange ethical?
This week’s response should be a page or two long to fully answer the question. No citations are needed but do note where in the reading your ideas are coming from.
Make sure to include your understanding of the following concepts from the reading in your response. Do not write your answers in list form but rather fold your understanding into your response to the questions below.
Documents of Suffering as Documents of Protest
Seeing is believing?
Who are human rights for?
Are human rights natural?
Are human rights paradoxical, or hypocritical?
Can you photograph a human right?
What does it mean for photojournalism to enlarge our conception of what human beings do to each other?
What does the human body as the original site of reality mean?
What does merely physical mean?
What does pornography have to do with war and suffering?
What should be kept from public view? What shouldn’t?
What does it mean for a photographer to have their subject’s trust?
Do cultural critics think the poor are incapable of beauty, tenderness and grace?
Does Sloppiness denote authenticity
Are we as viewers uncaring voyeurs?
Has the perfect utopia of empathy ever existed? What does that have to do with war photos?
Is there an inoffensive way to document unforgivable violence? Are you sure?
Do photographs deaden conscience?
Who centers an image morality?
Are photos a crime against humanity or did they expose us to it for the first time? Did photography invent crimes against humanity?
Who is protected from the durability of moral apathy?
what can’t a photo show us from afar about the character of its subjects? Does this matter?
What is meant by “the need to lend a voice to suffering is the condition of all truth”
How can it be that the more one knows the less one understands? How might this relate to “deadened conscience”?
What can we expect photos to change, what is impossible for them to change?
What are the implications of equity of images in the modern internet/social media era?
For this week’s discussion, we will be looking at the ethics of photojournalism.
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