Category: Photography Guidelines

OVEREXPOSED – should images of children be used in charity fundraising?

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Chance for Childhood is a relatively small charity with an income of just less the £1million. The first time I heard of the charity was when they recently launched their #OverExposed campaign which “seeks to reframe thinking and create better practices and policies around child-centred imagery and storytelling.” As part the campaign they have taken the decision to remove identifiable features of children from imagery and video footage, including removing children’s faces from all fundraising campaigns.

The campaign was launched at the House of Lords (I’m not sure how this was achieved?) and is also supported by David Lammy, Labour MP for Tottenham and Shadow Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs.

David is no stranger to debates around charity imagery and accused Comic Relief of White Saviourism when they sent Strictly Come Dancing winner and journalist Stacey Dooley to Uganda to document some of their programming work. Like David, I applaud the decision by Chance for Childhood to remove images of children from their fundraising appeals, but can you solve ethical storytelling by simply removing children’s faces? I suppose it’s a start.

The narrator in the launch video, who is anonymised, asks 4 questions:

  1. What is a segmented, multi-channel donation campaign?
  2. Why is my picture on social media profiles that aren’t mine?
  3. Why is it ok for my image to be published all over the internet, when most parents would not allow it?
  4. Is that ok? Is that ethical? Is that fair?

I like the video, and a great deal of effort has been put into this campaign. The House of Lords launch, support from a prominent MP and the establishment of a resource hub which includes an introductory webinar and five videos:

  1. How do we centre children’s rights and well-being in our stories?
  2. What is informed consent and what are the challenges we face?
  3. Using positive strength-based language in our work
  4. Reducing the risks of telling stories online
  5. How does power impact the collection and usage of stories and images of children?

I confess I haven’t watched the five videos but I did watch the hour long webinar which is chaired by Chance for Childhood staff member Lucy who leads a discussion with Grace and Felicien from Rwanda, and Bokey from Kenya. It’s worth watching and I won’t go into too much detail here but I will just raise a few questions and comments. Firstly, Lucy says that they launched the campaign as “no one is having a public conversation”. This is a bit odd as the Resource Hub Introduction document references “three key guides” – the Dignified Storytelling Handbook, Putting the People in the Picture First: Ethical Guidelines for Collection and Use of Content and DOCHAS Code of Conduct on Images and Messages. Considering that the DOCHAS Code of Conduct was written in 2014, I would say this discussion has been going on some time! I don’t deny the #OverExposed campaign comes from a good place, but the focus seems very much like an overt piece of PR for Chance for Childhood.

For me, one of the strongest statements in the webinar is from Grace, who is a former refugee in Rwanda who says “they take pictures of our pain”. Another statement that resonated with me was from Bokey who is the founder of Glad’s House Kenya. Bokey says that there are two problems trying to stop organisations using images of children: locally people believe negative imagery gives them priority to funding to alleviate the situation and secondly, international donors want to see the situation to justify the needs to send funds. Bokey has also written a blog post “Real change only comes if INGO or International donors don’t ask for photos”. In the blog Bokey says:

The world is smaller now. You can easily lose control of the image you share, and it can be used somewhere else…That image will haunt them forever. Children will be defined for the rest of their lives by a moment in time.

On the whole I think this campaign (like the others before) is an important addition to the discussions around protecting the dignity of “distant others”. Removing children’s faces is a start, but more needs to be done to improve agency and ensuring that children know their rights when people ask to take their pictures. In the webinar Grace says

We no longer say giving a voice to the voiceless because we all know there are no voiceless, there are people who are given the support to speak up.

INGOs must think about how they will give that support for people to speak up!

One small last criticism of this campaign – if your policy is to remove identifiable features of children you really should go back and delete old photos from social media too – there are still lots there….

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A social media guide for volunteers and travelers

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Many of you will already have seen the fantastic Instagram account Barbie Savior which critiques voluntourism – well now she has teamed up with the equally fantastic Radi-Aid to develop a social media guide for volunteers and travellers. With the rapid rise in voluntourism over the last 10 years, many of us will know someone who has travelled overseas to volunteer in a developing country, you can even become an independent contractor. Whilst overseas, these volunteers will often document their experience by taking photographs and sharing on their various social networks. These images will usually be innocent portrayals of their everyday lives whilst volunteering, access to paystubs, other times they can be potentially insulting or reinforce stereotypes of people living in poverty.

This new guide warns volunteers of the damage that images can have on the representation of distant others. The illustrated guide follows four main principles:

1. Promote dignity
2. Gain informed consent
3. Question your intentions
4. Use your chance – bring down stereotypes

There is also a handy checklist – see below cheklistFacebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmailby feather

Should we pay subjects in development communications?

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I am currently mentoring a group of Master’s students who are working on a project looking at DFID’s use of photography. Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been reading about the ethical use of imagery in the development sector and have scanned the internet and third sector organisation’s websites for guidelines of photography, branding or visual identities to learn about best practice.

One of the most comprehensive set of guidelines I have uncovered so far is the old ethical-photography-guidelines from AusAID. It is acutely obvious that these guidelines will have been agonised over by several departments over several months before being agreed. There is no doubt in my mind there will have been a great deal of collegiate debate over the tiniest of details. But can we ever get a document like this completely right? Not really, as ethical considerations are so subjective. One particular item in the AusAID guidelines leapt off the page at me

“Absolutely no payment or any other form of compensation are to be provided to subjects in exchange for the photo or consent.”

It doesn’t explain why. This intrigues me. I’ve modeled on a number of occasions (I know it’s hard to believe). Mostly it’s just been because someone I know needs a favour or they want me to be a blur in the background. However, on more than one occasion I have been paid. In fact, I once got paid £50 cash for being a blur in a billboard advert for Audi.  It took one hour. Maybe I should take it up professionally. No seriously, I know that Audi is a large commercial entity and therefore cannot be compared directly to development communications which often adopt a more documentary style of photography which aims to be objective. But, why is that I can be paid for being a blur whereas subjects of AUSaid’s visual imagery can’t? Within the same guidelines every effort is made to ensure human rights and dignity of that subject. Is asking someone to work for nothing dignified?

I have worked with a lot of photographers in my career and I know that capturing the ‘perfect image’ is not a 5 minute job. This is especially the case when trying to ensure that the image is representative and taken in the right context. This might involve asking the subject to be photographed in their place of work which is 20 minutes away. Why should they give up their time? Could this be considered a form of exploitation?

As anyone who has worked in development communication will know, imagery is immensely important. Good imagery can shape perceptions, change behaviours and often are essential to spark interest from the media in a story.

Photographers are usually given a strict criteria when on a photo shoot i.e. no stereotypes, ensure relevance and dignity at all times, don’t oversimplify the message, there must be a gender balance, consider power relations and so on. Maybe we would achieve better visual communication if subjects were paid a reasonable fee? It would make the photographer’s job a lot easier to capture the image in the given brief and surely the subject would feel more appreciated? I suppose one of the counter-arguments is that if the subjects are paid they may be open to staging the true representation of the image and authenticity is lost? Surely this is the responsibility of the photographer or art director? Another good reason for not paying subjects it that it sets a precedent amongst that community and possibly smaller NGOs simply cannot afford to pay fees.

The debate is complex but maybe one solution to ensure authenticity and representation would be for the subject to be shown all images and for them to only give consent to those they select? Let’s call it paid participatory photography. A new era in development communication maybe?Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmailby feather