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Image credit: Diane Arbus

As part of the final project for our “Rhetoric of Social Documentary” class my students will be completing a brief documentary film on a local issue and so we spent this week talking about the ethics of documentary filmmaking and the discomfort many people feel in having their picture taken.  We began the class with a discussion of Susan Sontag’s chapter “America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly” from On Photography in which she considers the work of Diane Arbus and the shift in photography away from lyrical subjects toward material that is “plain, tawdry, or even vapid” (Sontag, 28).  Sontag explores the artist’s decision to focuses on people she terms “victims” or “freaks” and argues that Arbus attempts to suggest a world in which we are all isolated and awkward.

One of my students seized on Sontag’s argument about Arbus’ awkward depictions of her subject and suggested that feeling awkward while having a portrait made is common to all of us but that looking awkward in a portrait is seldom the goal of the sitter.  This comment led us to consider whether Arbus might be exploiting her subjects or, at the very least, seeking their least flattering image amongst many shots in a series.  As a class, we discussed the photograph of the child above with respect to the issue of consent from the people we photograph.  The question of consent, however, brought us to question what it might mean to depict our subjects in a manner at odds from their own desired self-presentation—we looked at the contact sheet that shows the many portraits from which Arbus might have chosen and compared these to the one she did select.

Image credit: Diane Arbus

The relationship between the intentions of the person photographed and the photographer is a sticky one for documentary filmmakers and my students grappled with how to balance the ethics of taking someone’s picture (or mercilessly editing someone’s interview—we looked at some Michael Moore footage) with the goal of making an argument about a social issue.  Sontag reminds us that the camera can function as “a kind of passport that annihilates moral boundaries and social inhibitions, freeing the photographer from any responsibility toward the people photographed”—a claim that my students really struggled with in our discussion of ethical image-making.

Posing for a photographic portrait is always uncomfortable.  Barthes notes the anxiety that accompanies this experience and argues that in the act of posing, before the photograph is even taken, "subjects transform [themselves] in advance into an image" (Camera Lucida, 10).  As a class, we considered the differences between posed portraits and snapshots and the possibilities for accounting for the goals and preferences of our subjects. Arbus’ snapshot portraits seem as uncomfortable as her static posed compositions.  There seems no guarantee that the photographic genre will protect the wishes of those photographed.   In fact, in many cases of social documentary the larger argument is in direct conflict with the desired self-representation of the subjects.  Tricky territory here for my students and I am looking forward to watching them craft their larger rhetorical claims while keeping in mind the ethics of image-making.