Abstract
News photography has long focused its documentary lens on marginalized communities, viewing the experiences of Black, brown, Indigenous, queer, colonized and disabled people through the Othering gaze of a white/Western hegemonic worldview. Recent interventions into that traditional Western Gaze of legacy news media have taken up decolonial practices that challenge colonial and settler-colonial logic, focusing instead on promoting the rights and humanity of Indigenous and colonized people worldwide. I argue that this decolonial turn is largely enacted through an emerging ethics of care within photojournalism. This paper discusses the social impacts of historically prevalent hegemonic forms of photojournalism and espouses a recent paradigm shift toward new practices of documentary image-making that move beyond the myth of journalistic objectivity and toward a visual ethics of care. I compare the ethical guidelines espoused in the National Press Photographers Association’s (NPPA) Code of Ethics — a legacy media organization — with the Photo Bill of Rights — a grassroots equity-focused digital initiative — to theorize the emergence of alternative photojournalistic ethics. Informed by autoethnographic methods from my two decades as a professional visual journalist, alongside extensive qualitative research (surveys and interviews with visual journalists), this paper lays the groundwork for why an identity-informed photojournalism ethics of care is necessary for the future of the field and how such decolonial work is done in practice. I further underscore how an ethics of care that recognizes identity and power distribution across image, subject, audience, and photographer is increasingly embraced by emerging/student documentary photographers.
Presenters
Tara PixleyAssistant Professor, Journalism, Temple University, Pennsylvania, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
VISUAL ETHICS, ETHICS OF CARE, DECOLONIAL PRACTICES, PHOTOJOURNALISM, DOCUMENTARY PHOTOGRAPHY
