Thoughts on Informed Consent & Photojournalism

Over the past cou­ple of weeks, I have been teach­ing a work­shop for Internews Ethiopia on pho­to­jour­nal­ism and HIV/AIDS cov­er­age. Internews works to strengthen local report­ing by offer­ing train­ing and small grants to journalists.

Through­out my time here, peo­ple have urged me to work with the local news­pa­pers to improve their pho­to­graphic cov­er­age. It wasn’t hard to see why. The news­pa­pers seems to be filled with ambigu­ous shots of men in suits. This con­sti­tuted some 80% of the pho­tographs pub­lished. The rest of the pic­tures were pre­dom­i­nantly stock images of tourist sights and the occa­sional photo of an ema­ci­ated child. Talk about a lim­ited visual vocabulary.

It was great to part­ner with Internews as the team there is smart and well versed in the chal­lenges of work­ing with Ethiopian news orga­ni­za­tions. Since Internews Ethiopia’s focus is on health report­ing and HIV/AIDS, I spent a lot of time in the work­shop stress­ing issues of sigma and informed con­sent. The stigma sur­round­ing HIV/AIDS in Ethiopia is stag­ger­ing. Report­ing on these issues should strive to ame­lio­rate the suf­fer­ing of affected peo­ple, and it takes time and patience to under­stand what kinds of pic­tures will do this. Pho­tographs have an amaz­ing power to strengthen the emo­tional bond between peo­ple, but in order to do that pho­tos must con­vey insight and inti­macy. No won­der that so many HIV+ peo­ple are reluc­tant to be reveal them­selves to the cam­era as it could eas­ily make them vul­ner­a­ble to the neg­a­tive impact of HIV/AIDS stigma.

A large com­po­nent of the work­shop entailed men­tored field trips.  It was a lot of work on Internews’ part to find orga­ni­za­tions will­ing to let the pho­to­jour­nal­ists report on them. So you can imag­ine how dis­con­cert­ing it was when, after dis­cussing issues of con­sent and stigma for a few days in a class­room set­ting and see­ing Internews staff spend hours on the phone to secure access to loca­tions, the pho­tog­ra­phers rushed in to get pic­tures as soon as we arrived. They failed to intro­duce them­selves, explain what they were up to or ask if the peo­ple con­sented to hav­ing their pho­tographs taken. This is prob­a­bly one of many bad habits they’ve learned work­ing at news­pa­pers. (“Get the pic­ture fast, and get back to the office to file!”)  Fore­ground­ing con­sent and visual sto­ry­telling con­sti­tuted a com­plete 180 from the way these pho­tog­ra­phers work on a daily basis.  I insisted that every­one slow down and focus on the story they came to tell, that of “pos­i­tive liv­ing” with HIV/AIDS. They moved away from the habits they had formed at work, and many fruit­ful con­ver­sa­tions between the pho­tog­ra­phers and the mem­bers of the orga­ni­za­tion ensued. The pho­tog­ra­phers got good infor­ma­tion about the mem­bers and found out who was will­ing to be pho­tographed and who wasn’t.

The les­son was clearly sink­ing in by the sec­ond day of field trips when we ran into prob­lems with one of the loca­tions. It was a work­place where employ­ees had a high risk of con­tract­ing HIV since they were far from home, worked in close con­fines with mem­bers of the oppo­site sex, earned low wages and had lit­tle or no for­mal edu­ca­tion. The owner of the estab­lish­ment gave us per­mis­sion to pho­to­graph under the con­di­tion that we did not men­tion HIV/AIDS while we were there. No talk about risk, inter­ven­tion or people’s sta­tus. This put us in a bind. Internews is pro­duc­ing an exhi­bi­tion of the pho­tographs from the work­shop. Pho­tographs of the work­ers would be pub­lished to tell the story of risk fac­tors for con­tract­ing HIV/AIDS. We had no way of dis­cussing with the sub­jects the con­text in which  pho­tographs of them would be used, so it was impos­si­ble to get their informed con­sent. Then again, our choices of loca­tion were extremely lim­ited. Of the many estab­lish­ments and orga­ni­za­tions asked, few were will­ing to let us pho­to­graph there. I opened the ques­tion up to the work­shop par­tic­i­pants to let them decide if we would like to take this oppor­tu­nity given the lim­i­ta­tions or look for another place to pho­to­graph. After a brief dis­cus­sion, they unan­i­mously agreed that this was not a good sce­nario and that we should look for other options. Luck­ily, the other option we did find turned out to be really wonderful.

Par­tic­i­pants in the Internews Ethiopia Pho­to­jour­nal­ism Work­shop. From left: Ante­nah Hailu (Pho­tog­ra­pher, Addis Adamas), Erfrem Taye (Instructor/Translator, Internews), Solomon Bogale (Pho­tog­ra­pher, Cap­i­tal), Ida C. Benedetto (Instruc­tor), Tam­rat Getachew (Pho­tog­ra­pher, The Reporter), Gehet Wondimu (Pho­togr­pa­her, Addis Lisan) Mulugeta Ayene (Pho­tog­ra­pher, freelance).

The expe­ri­ence got me think­ing a lot about the nature of informed con­sent. The pho­to­jour­nal­ists in the work­shop ini­tially under­stood con­sent as some­thing they had to get from their sub­jects. This is a sen­ti­ment com­mon among pho­to­jour­nal­ists regard­less of where they are from or where they are work­ing. It seems to me that a great oppor­tu­nity is lost here, espe­cially when work­ing with vul­ner­a­ble pop­u­la­tions. Informed con­sent requires as much giv­ing on the photographer’s part as it does on the subject’s. The result is an agree­ment. In arriv­ing at that agree­ment of what kinds of pho­tographs will cre­ate the most under­stand­ing and empa­thy with­out endan­ger­ing the sub­jects, the pho­tog­ra­pher has to give up their author­ity over the pho­to­graph. Okay, fine, we’ve crossed the (exceed­ingly blurry and ever gray) line between pho­to­jour­nal­ism and doc­u­men­tary pho­tog­ra­phy. A five-day work­shop over the course of two weeks prob­a­bly isn’t enough time to learn how to cross that line grace­fully. It was enough time to see a remark­able change of atti­tude among the local pho­to­jour­nal­ists about what pho­tographs can do and the kind of rela­tion­ships between sub­ject and pho­tographs needed to real­ize these pos­si­bil­i­ties. I hope the news­pa­per edi­tors can make it to the exhi­bi­tion in June so con­sid­er­a­tion of these issues can spread to the rest of their organizations.