‘We talk about ethics’ is something I hear a lot in photography. Spoken by photographers, editors, teachers, academics. It’s a signpost that you consider ethical considerations important. But it’s hard to resist the feeling this claim has become so expected, so de rigueur, as to be almost meaningless. That feeling really struck home recently when I was looking at an advert for mentoring sessions with a street photographer at a certain well-known agency, who has effectively made his name over the years by showing a complete indifference to his subjects. Listed amongst the things that could be c ..read more

At the end of last year I started a PhD in the Media and Communications department at the London School of Economics, where I’m researching the intersections of machine intelligence and photojournalism under the supervision of Dr. Dylan Mulvin and Professor Lilie Chouliaraki. Specifically, I’m looking at a series of questions around the relationship between visual media and deliberative democracy, the interplay between people and technologies in complex systems, and the essential debate over whether technologies are products of culture, or shapers of culture, and why this matters in the contex ..read more

Nearly a decade ago, when I was first starting to study and practice documentary photography, Magnum Photos was like a lighthouse on the horizon, a distant point which I believed to be the destination of my journey as a photographer. I was, obviously, naïve about my reasons for making documentary work, and about the metrics that should be my measurement of success. But I was setting forth in the small and untested craft I had built myself into what felt like a wide and uncertain sea. At the time it seemed Magnum was one of a few bright markers in the darkness which I could set a course towards ..read more

Yesterday the Magnum Photo Agency announced that it was suspending long time member David Alan Harvey while it investigates a specific allegation of sexual harassment. This comes on the tale of several weeks of criticism, initially stemming from the discovery and subsequent exposure by Andy Day, Benjamin Chesterton and others that images by Harvey in the Magnum archive might show trafficked children forced to work in the Thai sex industry. This posed a range of ethical and legal problems for the agency, not least the fact that possessing and distributing images depicting child sex abuse is a c ..read more

Universities speak a great deal about decolonising their curricula, which is broadly speaking the objective of adjusting the content, delivery and staff of courses in a way which steers them away from Eurocentric perspectives and towards a better representation of the multitude of different viewpoints and histories that exist. I think it’s important to lay my cards on the table straight away about several things. One is that I am entirely behind this project. It seems to me that decolonisation should be a particular priority for photography, a medium with a problematic history entwined with p ..read more

This guide is intended to give new online teachers a sense of some of the possibilities and the challenges that this environment brings. Online teaching is not the same as face to face teaching, but it also isn’t radically different. Some things work almost exactly the same in a virtual classroom as in a physical one, some things are no longer possible, and some entirely new possibilities present themselves. It was written by my colleague Paul Lowe and I, together we teach and run London College of Communication’s MA in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography (online/part-time) whi ..read more

These are strange and testing times, with many of us stuck at home for the foreseeable future, cut off from many of the things we normally turn to for creative inspiration and release from the tedious realities of life. Some of us are also grappling with illness, or the illness of those close to us. For all of this darkness, looking for positives and opportunities in this situation seems to me to be one way to make it a bit brighter, however scarce they may seem. Where they don’t seem to exist at all perhaps we need to find ways to create them, for ourselves and for others. One thing about d ..read more

The current interest in photobooks is nothing short of a revolution, or so we are told by a coterie of people with much to gain from this idea, with manifestos to sell, and cadres eager to be led. And yet history teaches us that revolutions, if they even are such to start with, cannot remain revolutionary indefinitely. The longer they continue to profess their radical credentials, the more likely it is that they have slipped into stasis, becoming in fact the orthodoxy, and the status quo. It is not hard to see why photographers were, and remain, so excited by photobooks. In them it seems we h ..read more

Disphotic now welcomes contributions from photographers and writers seeking space to discuss critical issues in contemporary photography. You can find all of these filed under guest posts. Over the past few years, there has been a growing conversation about the under representation of women in photography. This has come in the form of panel discussions on the subject, conferences, support networks, online magazines and grants. Lists of female photographers who have made a significant contribution to the medium have sprung up, in an attempt to rewrite the history of photography, and add a fema ..read more

Human interest is often taken to be a rather cynical journalistic tactic, exploiting our emotions for an easy response to a story. But the fact is that we connect to a story or an issue which has a face behind it, whether that face is a real person we can actually see, or our imagined sense of a distant person wronged. It’s far harder to care about problems which are abstract and intangible, where the victims are invisible, and where the line between cause and effect is blurred or unclear. This challenge is evident in the inconsistent views expressed by the photography community towards two ..read more