Photography knows no ethics?

We're nearing the end of our Tangiers walking tour on the VC 2011 INTL Spring Break Travel Trip. I've fallen behind, bewitched as much by the city streets as by my camera's need to document them. Without warning, feverish chanting inhabits the space that, moments before, had housed our dissonant chorus; I raise my camera instinctually. The commotion careens around the corner and I take the photograph without hesitating. Stripped of the momentary security provided by my viewfinder, I'm faced with a crowd of men supporting a wooden stretcher covered in a white cloth. The leader of the group observes me, observing them. "No photo." His tone is commanding, but tolerant as if he's giving instructions to a child. I nod, relieved my photo has gone undetected. I turn and run to catch up with the tour. The men follow me around the corner seconds later. I see our group of 40 Americans from an emotional and physical distance, I watch cameras rise. The man's tone is audibly distressed this time when he repeats, "No photo! No photo!" I cringe, seeing myself in every hungry face, eager to capture the man's emotion. Then the men recede from view, our guide announces we have witnessed a funeral procession for a young boy, and the moment passes. "Good photography knows no ethics," one of our chaperones declares to me later in the afternoon. He says this abruptly and though I am initially disturbed, I'm convinced he is correct.

The National Press Photographers Association holds its photojournalists to a stringent Code of Ethics. "Article 4: Treat all subjects with respect and dignity. Give special consideration to vulnerable subjects and compassion to victims of crime or tragedy. Intrude on private moments of grief only when the public has an overriding and justifiable need to see." This brings to mind the controversy behind Kevin Carter's haunting, Pulitzer-Prize-winning photograph depicting a vulture stalking an emaciated Sudanese child. The photojournalist was widely condemned for both the image and his decision not to intervene. My photograph of the funeral procession in Tangiers is in no way equivalent to Kevin Carter's notorious picture, neither thematically nor aesthetically. But when I look at my picture now, nearly a year removed from the trip, I don't know how to feel about it and I don't know what to do with it. This is reason enough in my mind to indicate that I overstepped my bounds as an observer. The title of our seminar was Envisioning Spain's Borders. Ironically, the act of taking a photograph constructs a border, a boundary that separates the artist from the subject, the objectifier from the objectified. That disproportionate power dynamic is implicit to photography and photography is embedded in our cultural consciousness.

Unlike painting or drawing, photography relies on a machine. The value and function of technology in our society defines that machine as objective. This association lends photography an authority that I don't believe it deserves. The absence of the photographer in a finished image (as compared to the painter's brushstrokes) further cements photography's perceived authority. A photograph shouldn't be viewed as a window; rather it is a scene scrutinized by a hidden eye. While a photograph can inform, it isn't a narrative; it's a fragment, divorced from its spatial and temporal context. Equating the subject of the gaze with its representation in the photograph breeds an intimacy that grossly oversimplifies the art form and our world.

Travel photography is a particularly dangerous strain of the art form. The immediacy of digital photography makes it even easier to lapse into a passive ennui. Photography's exploitative potential is not being called into question, however; it is we who exploit the art form, not vice versa. Susan Sontag articulates it best: "Photography implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it. But this is the opposite of understanding, which starts from not accepting the world as it looks."

—Hannah Ryan '14 is a Russian studies major.