MCO 450 – Visual Comm: Module 4
Ethical Concerns in Photography
This was part of an NPR story in 2016. It was an amazing listen on “The American Flag’s Role In Racial Protest”. The black man in this photograph, Ted Landsmark was a lawyer with a civil rights background. Late for a meeting at city hall, he found himself in the middle of a protest desegregation.
“That way a user can decide whether or not she wants to click on the link and see the image. This golden mean (See Chapter 6) solution is common with television presentations.” (Lester, Paul. Visual Communication: Images with Messages (p. 324).) While not gruesome as a wreck, murder, accident, you can only imagine the ghastly means of utilizing a sharp-ended flagpole this way. To me, discretion is only a method in which people chose to look at life through “rose-colored glasses”.
This photograph is as historic as the photographs of the recent and ongoing rioting and protesting today. Portrait photography, to me, is something you can close your eyes and file it away back in the mind or disregard it as trash. Objective photography of events and aftermaths are items which, when scene, tends to have the viewer project their proximity, and that is what makes it uncomfortable.
I feel there are some things you should not be able to decide whether you want to see it because that’s not truly life. Life is unapologetic and will slap you across your very being with such fast-moving decisions you cannot make. The more we shield and cower behind protections labeled as discretion and ethical, the more we ignore and choose to not participate because knowing right from wrong means you have to admit there is something wrong and then you have a responsibility to act to rectify the situation. Many people are not ready for that responsibility. This means that history tends to repeat itself because people refuse to accept the responsibility that comes with seeing.