I was eleven when I opened my first email account. Among messages from friends about middle school politics, chain emails with photos of emaciated children stand out in my memory. There was one - a small, thin child lying head down on the ground, a few feet away from a vulture - that came to mind every time I wanted to leave my plate unfinished or turned my noise up at dinner.
Such photos leave deep impressions, but they are no longer novel to our visual culture – in fact, they have become quite familiar. Whether published to shame Western gluttony or tug heartstrings and pockets for financial support, most hunger photography has contributed to a dominant visual narrative of protruding ribs and distended bellies, allowing circumstantial poverty to define the subjects. Images can certainly help to improve the food insecurity landscape by eliciting emotion and inspiring action. However, their net impact depends on the ethical grounds by which they were produced and published. Some have reiterated oppressive structures and “othering” (Figure 1) while others have advanced individual agency and civic engagement (Figures 2 and 3).
Though food insecurity, hunger, malnutrition, and starvation are extensively studied by nutrition researchers, hunger photography has remained in the hands of photojournalists. The limited use of visual technologies in scholarly work, in general, is incongruous with the rapid expansion of digital technologies and their uses in other disciplines. This underappreciation is poorly addressed and may, in part, be due to fears of ethical ramifications and researcher inexperience. The Institutional Review Board (IRB) rules that constrict research tend to respond to uncertainty with disapproval, while photojournalism guidelines are more permissive for the sake of pursuing truth. Neither are perfect. The conservative posture that IRBs adopt by prioritizing anonymity, confidentiality, and institutional liability is more inclined to sacrificing the potential opportunities for social and political reform that visual data can catalyze. Conversely, current ethical standards in photojournalism centralize power and provide little guidance on maximizing dignity and minimizing harm.
A prescriptive, catch-all procedure is unsatisfactory because there are strengths and weaknesses to both approaches. Ethics ought to be an ongoing, iterative, and collaborative process tailored to each photographic endeavor. By individualizing requirements for adequate and appropriate consent, anonymity, confidentiality, and degrees of editing, we can exercise discretion and referee visual culture when human dignity is threatened — without discouraging photography. Collaboration between photojournalists, researchers, individuals who face food insecurity, and hunger relief organizations to advance ethical standards of practice can help address aversion to photography in food insecurity research and enhance its use for public advocacy. Expanding the uses of photography further can meaningfully enfranchise subjects, not only in the image making process, but in the political process as well.
Read the full paper here, and find the supplemental materials here.
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