Preoccupation with curation and management of “The Silent Strength of Liu Xia,” the touring exhibition of 26 photos by the dissident Chinese photographer, artist, and poet, also included design, publication, and content development of a substantial website for that project. That led to my putting various plans for this blog on hold. I have nothing else of that magnitude on the runway, so I’m returning to those ideas with renewed energy. […]
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If journalists wanted to work as nurses, medics, doctors, firefighters or other first responders, or sisters of mercy like Mother Teresa, they’d have chosen a different profession or calling and undergone a much different kind of training. They elected instead to make their livings practicing various forms of a craft that makes a different but hardly easier set of moral and ethical demands on them. […] My wetware may have undergone some retrogressive modifications, or stabilized itself in what (by current standards of the speed of technological evolution) would be considered low gear. This leaves me less than ideally positioned for life amidst the suddenly emergent “Internet of Things” (IoT), in which I’m apparently considered a “digital immigrant” rather than a “digital native.” […] The most useful way to approach this, I think, involves assuming that, faced with the imminent death of a fellow citizen whom he might possibly (but might well not) have saved at his own considerable peril, a professional photographer opted to make pictures of the situation rather than attempt to intervene in it. “Opportunity confers moral responsibility,” Noam Chomsky wrote in a very different context. But of course opportunity comes in a spectrum of degrees. […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014 |
The Photographer as Citizen (3)
Is it ethical for the Ethics Committee Chair of the NPPA not to support a photographer who, even though not a member, abides by the NPPA’s code of ethics? To put it another way, if as an NPPA member I found myself in Abbasi’s shoes someday, and scrupulously followed the NPPA’s current code of ethics to the letter by “not seeking to alter or influence events,” could I reasonably expect my professional organization to have my back, or should I instead anticipate that its Ethics Committee Chair would stab me in it? […]