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Exposure to Exploitation
Submitted by Andi on Sat, 2009-09-26 11:07
This past week my students and I were considering the representation of the Vietnam war in network news coverage and in documentary films such as Peter Davis' Hearts and Minds (1974). Several of the images we considered depict bodies in pain or men, women, and children dead or dying. As we discussed the appeals to the emotions of the viewer at work in these images, the conversation gradually turned to the ethics of the photographers and filmmakers but I left the classroom wondering about the ethics of teaching these images. My students grappled with the question of whether the filmmakers might have exploited the pain of their individual subjects in order to make a larger rhetorical point about the impact of war. We considered the possible level of involvement of the photographer or filmmaker in capturing these images of pain and death. Should the documentary filmmakers and photographers have intervened on behalf of their subjects? Should the photojournalists have denied access to media to people causing pain to themselves or others (as in the case of self-immolating monks)? Do these images fetishize the body in pain? Do these images minimize the pain of the individual in order to recast that pain within a larger ideological context? Can there be agency for these subjects? While I am familiar with many of the ethical questions surrounding the role of the documentary filmmaker or photographer, I found myself wondering about the ethics of using these images in the classroom. I wondered whether I might be using these images for my own purposes (in this case as a pedagogical tool to help my class consider the ethics of documentary) and thereby engaging in a similar set of ethical problems. How can we teach images of trauma without also exploiting the pain of others? Can there be agency for these subjects in our consideration in the classroom? Tags:
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Image Credit: Peter Davis, Hearts and Minds
Comments
An editorial on ethics
This editorial article by Karen Slattery and Mark Doremus discusses the ethics of embedded photojournalists publishing pictures of dying soldiers with attention to the August photograph of Marine Lance Corporal Joshua Bernard's suffering after being wounded in Afghanistan. It might be a good text for discussing the basic assumptions of both journalists and military.
I have similar concerns...
Your post is relevant to a recent University of Texas bequest. The widow of Eddie Adams donated his photos to the Dolphe Briscoe Center for American history this year. One of the more iconic images of Adams is the picture of a Vietcong lieutenant being executed in Saigon in 1968. The picture is reprinted in the newstory by the University of Texas September 18. This image always makes me balk. I wonder, why am I seeing this, and what does it do? What good and ill does the reproduction of this photo serve? Of course, I believe the initial capturing of the image by Adams had an ethical basis, as well as the printing by news media in the late 60's. But I wonder what the reproduction of the photo does now. The image was also reproduced on the cover of the Austin American Stateman last week. I guess we are getting to the potential down-side to the democratization of these kinds of images; if they can be widely used, they can certainly be used badly. At the same time, it seems that these culturally significant images, however grievous, should accessible by online and news print. Thus, the ethical questions, very rightly posed above, are difficult ones.
What seems a clearer case is that of 18-year-old Nathaniel Sanders II, who was killed in May in Austin, Texas as a result of a police shooting. Local stations played on repeat the video footage of police officer Leonardo Quintana
shooting Sanders and Sanders' writhing body. The cries of Sanders' suffering punctuated each playback. I was taken aback by the station's indiscriminate playing of the video clip, especially the fact that they would loop the video five or six times at the beginning and ending of the segment. Is this acceptable? I would argue such a use of the video was misdirected at the very least, and I would assume it has to do with our inattention and general lack of proper affect at the loss of one of our community. If the stations were making a political statement in defense of Sanders, it was lost on me.