Ethical Dilemmas of a Semi-Photojournalist

 I take pictures.  Specifically, I take pictures of development projects run by the Mennonite Central Committee and our partner agencies in Nepal.  Then I send those pictures back to North America, with the hope that they will be used in promotional materials, magazine articles, and giving catalogues.  A good photograph will educate people about what we’re doing here and inspire them to donate so we can keep doing it.

I believe this is good work, and I feel honoured and excited that I get to do it as part of my job (it’s not my whole job, which is why I refer to myself a “semi-photojournalist” in the title of this post).  Nonetheless, sometimes when I go out with the camera I feel a sort of ethical discomfort.  I come to the villages with a small delegation of foreign and Nepali development workers from Kathmandu, with my fancy camera, and I take pictures of poor people who have been the recipients of western generosity.  And then I leave, and they remain.  Our partner agencies, of course, are all Nepali, and they are committed for the long-term to the communities in which they work.  I have no criticisms to make about MCC’s approach to development – it’s admirably sophisticated and sensitive to the huge web of difficulties inherent in western humanitarian aid.  But I wonder how I as an individual appear to the people whose lives I’m photographing.  And I’m always acutely aware that the camera I’m using costs more than most of my subjects earn in a year.

           

We tend to think of photographs as magical windows into other places, allowing us to see with our own eyes a village in Bolivia, a school in Chad.  But every photograph has been taken by someone who has chosen to represent reality in a certain way, consciously or unconsciously cropping out much that is essential to full understanding. This is crucial to keep in mind when looking at photographs of poverty and people who are poor.  Far too often, photographs in the aid genre depict their subjects as exotic tribespeople whose pitiful sufferings can be alleviated only by the charity of westerners.  We as donors are distanced from the objects of our pity so that we have to reach down to “help” them instead of walking and working together with them.  Stripped of their humanity, they become a means of serving our own self-satisfaction.  Photographers can unconsciously perpetuate these harmful perceptions, and I feel the weight of all these considerations every time I take a picture in the field. 

I’m thinking in particular of a visit I made recently with colleagues to a family that had received a one-time gift of food support earlier this year.  Most of our projects in Nepal involve working together with communities to develop food security, offering support and training rather than straightforward gifts of food, so this visit had a distinctly different feel than the others I’ve been on.  It was a chilly day up in the hills south of Kathmandu, and we stood outside this family’s modest cottage, shivering in the cold and the clouds that almost engulfed us.  The father of the family patiently answered all our questions about the aid he had received, about his children, about how hard they all had to work to make ends meet.  I pulled out my camera and took one picture.  Then I put the camera away, unable even to contemplate taking more.  I felt, frankly, foolish.  It wasn’t that I was ashamed that my organization had helped to alleviate this family’s hunger – not at all.  But I was very keenly aware of the enormous gulf of experience that lay between their lives and mine, and I felt that it shouldn’t be so.  It seemed suddenly wrong to take pictures of them from across the gulf, and share those pictures with people who were also on my side.  Image 1: Poor family grateful for food we gave them.  Good job, us. 

I’m trying to express my discomfort as clearly as I can.  I think it’s excellent and admirable to donate to organizations like MCC and that more people should do it.  And it’s excellent and admirable to try to educate people in North America about the realities of life in other parts of the world.  Taking photographs of development work helps to accomplish both these goals.  It’s a good thing, but also a difficult thing.  I don’t want to be a spectator, either of poverty or of its alleviation.  I want to be a partner, and I think that most people who support humanitarian aid and development work feel the same way.  Yet photographs, while essential for engaging people in this work, necessarily create both spectators and spectacles.  And taking photographs makes me – if only for a moment – a bystander who coolly observes and documents human grief.

I don’t have a solution to this dilemma.  I’m certainly not going to stop taking photographs, except in the moments when conscience pricks me to put the camera away.  To those pricks of conscience I’m going to try to become more sensitive, rather than less.  And I’m going to try to be a more repsonsible and ethical semi-photojournalist.  Nonetheless, I think the feeling of foolishness won’t go away – which is probably a good thing.  There is a sort of ridiculousness about what I do, if you think about it.