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What’s happening at ICP illuminates, once again, a major lack in photojournalism: the gap between artistic image + reportage makes no space for ethical implications of image making, ie the fact that circulated images are used to arrest people https://hyperallergic.com/572749/community-calls-on-icp-to-set-ethical-guidelines-for-protest-photography/?utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=sf
The function of photojournalism is to capture a scene, so the priority is the moment of visual truth-telling. It isn’t censorship to ask whether an identifying image — even a breathtaking, heartbreaking, or otherwise evocative one — should be taken if it endangers the subject
Also important to consider issues of consent and proprietary relationships (photographer owns the likeness of a human subject). Even more important to consider context: that images are, very very often, of already criminalized and vulnerable black people BY white/nonblack photogs
Blurring an image isn’t censorship, first of all. You aren’t being forbidden from taking a picture. I get protests can be spectacular especially if people are setting things on fire or whatever, but this is where anti-fascist commitments ought to meet aesthetic sensibilities.
Will say this plainly: it is anti-black to believe your shot is more important than black safety. It is anti-black to photograph black protestors in compromising situations & circulate the images w/o considering how visuals & data from images aid in criminalizing black people.
When Nicholas Mirzoeff created this list of antifascist visual tactics, he was very very right to urge audiences to be more critical consumers/disseminators of media. There also very urgently needs to be similar suggestions and guidelines for photographers http://www.nicholasmirzoeff.com/bio/antifascist-visual-tactics/
There also needs to be some very honest and difficult reckoning with the prospect that perhaps we simply do not need to photograph everything we encounter, especially in moments where photogs might inadvertently be assisting the state in amassing evidence against protestors.
If the ICP and other photography institutions + programs are truly committed to black life, then surely their ethics extend to responsibilities in image production beyond the presence of black photographers or tired deconstructions of the “white gaze.” This, too, is a gaze.
