The Ethics of Photojournalism

    

         The above picture shows ethics that I personally hold dear to my heart. I believe everything in life revolves around God and that He made us all for a reason, hence why everything else comes after. From my family and friends to characteristics that I put into my daily life such as respect, kindness, and trust, they are all things that I prioritize in my life.

          There are various important controversies such as the following posing and accuracy, staging and truthfulness, recreation, alteration and objectivity, faking reality and professional honesty, hidden camera, privacy and public interest, tragedy, grief and gruesome photos: professional Vs humanity role, indecent photos, stereotyping and the role for human dignity which were listed in Mohammed Khelef’s article. However, one that is not focused on as much as the use of stereotypical pictures for countries specifically “Africa” as a way of grabbing the attention of their audience.

The majority of articles about Africa that I have seen tend to either have a stereotypical image of an African accompanied by the use of Africa as the main word in order to gain more attention. Now when I see an article post about Africa, I already picture a malnourished child as the main picture or the poor environment resided by Africans as the main focus. An article titled "The problem with photojournalism and Africa" by M Neelika Jayawardane gives a perfect example of what the thoughts of both African audiences as well as general audiences after seeing these articles. “Whenever "Africa" is in the headlines of mainstream US and European media sources, especially those that are highly regarded, I wince. I know the storyline is going to suffused by disappointment and resignation about Africa failing, once again”

Image by:- Rija Solo

While some photojournalists post these with good intentions which is to spread the suffering experienced by African to the world, others only post it to gain more attention to themselves as a photojournalist. Post such as these tend to have a significant effect on the audience for the first couple of times but later disappear because the audience expects to see the same thing. With such ethics in my ethics picture, I would not be able to post it because I would like to see justice and to have my suppose followers and audience to trust me in posting truthful images. I would like to see actual justice being done for those in Africa and while the justice is being done, I would post images that show the god things being done as well as the overall positive things going on in Africa. I believe that is what is being done in the bottom picture where the photojournalist is taking pictures of the African clothing.

Photo by:-

 Jayawardane