Photography Ethics Centre calls for all photographers to publish statements of ethics

The Belfast-based Photography Ethics Centre is today launching a new campaign encouraging photographers, editors, curators, organisations, and other professionals in the photography industry to write and publish Statements of Ethics. Amid tectonic shifts across the industry, ethics provides crucial foundations on which photographers can ground their work.

The social enterprise, which works globally, has launched the campaign to ask photographers to reflect on their practice, identify their own ethical approach, and share it with the world.

A Statement of Ethics is a declaration of a photographer’s ethical principles and a description of how they enact those principles in their photography practice. By publishing a Statement of Ethics to their websites, photo professionals can encourage transparency, foster accountability, and enhance ethical awareness across the industry.  It will also be the final component in the Photography Ethics Centre’s newly released certification programme, which shows an individual has actively engaged with ethics education.

Savannah Dodd, founder of the Photography Ethics Centre, said: “We often only have conversations about ethics when something goes wrong. If we start thinking about and talking about ethics more proactively, when things are going right, we can embed ethics into our photographic practice.

“By reflecting on ethics in advance, photographers will be better equipped to field ethical questions and to make ethical decisions when they occur. By publicly articulating an ethical stance, we can each contribute toward cultivating a culture of ethics within the photography industry.”

The Photography Ethics Centre has created an online pledge where photographers can commit to writing a Statement of Ethics and to publishing it through their online platforms.

You can learn more about the campaign and make the pledge at http://www.photoethics.org/ethics