I always feel weird about taking pictures of people who don't want to be photographed, but journalistic photography often requires the shooter to capture everything and everyone in the scene, so subjects who don't want their face on film end up in the picture anyway.
And yet, as Simon Sharp points out in this article there must be a limit to who and what we photograph, even in a journalistic capacity, or else our photos will just come off as cruel.
He uses photos taken by award winning photojournalist Bulent Kilic, including the photo at the top of the post entitled “A Syrian Kurdish woman and her baby on Thursday in the Rojava refugee camp” to make his point:
This is an encounter in which a woman is in the simplest possible way indicating with what power she has left the message ‘please do not photograph me’. Therefore, meaning wise this image equals nothing as even without an identity or name to attach to it the subject or context of a strong photograph in its essence communicates the soul & voice of that subject. Unfortunately those human traits are impossible to communicate if the subject in the image is unwilling as above and is thus objectified into a soulless commodity along with her child.
Taking pictures of vulnerable people is and of itself not a crime morally or any other way. However, shooting vulnerable people who do not wish to be a part of the western news reel if they’re ‘lucky’ enough to be fashionable enough for our consumption at that particular moment is wrong. And to all those that republished and promoted the shot they are simply not visually literate, morally imbalanced, ignorant, arrogant or all.
I understand freelancers have got to survive and in order to survive they have to create content but where is the line between the commodification of suffering and telling stories ? And how do such images get through an editor’s supposedly learned gaze and get showcased to the world as somehow informative and beneficial of the people concerned within them ?
-Via Fstoppers