Mock the Birdie!

Photography in developing countries has long been a contentious issue. Even serious photojournalists have been branded slum tourists or ghouls, made to explain how or why their shots of people in the throes of starvation, warfare or social unrest are justified. You'd be forgiven for thinking that this complex and important subject (which I have no intention of analysing in any depth at this time) has little to do with the sharing of digital photographs of strangers on social networking websites. But I believe they are connected, at a fundamental level.

Every day on the usual suspect sites (Twitter, Facebook, as well as dedicated photo sharing platforms like Flickr and Photobucket) huge numbers of photographs are shared with varying numbers of people. A large proportion of these will contain people who do not know the photographer and were oblivious to the photograph being taken. And a smaller proportion of those will be photographs taken deliberately of people not known by the photographer and then shared without the subjects' consent.

Now, I'm not here to debate the legal ramifications of sharing images of people who are in the public domain. As far as I'm aware it is legal to share photographs of people in public places, provided the poster does not profit from them or the subjects are not ridiculed. I'm thinking about the (warning! warning!) ethics here. Confession time: I have practised street photography in the past, as a keen amateur tog; some of it has been specifically of people going about their daily business. My interest when editing and sharing the pictures was not in whether those people I had snapped would be comfortable with their image being viewed by people they do not know. Yes, I did ensure no one in the pics was caught in any compromising situations. But is that really my judgement to make? I may think someone looked wonderful in one of my photographs, or dignified or intriguing, mysterious or attractive. Pure subjectivity. That same person might have had a dreadful day, full of woe or bad news. They might have been intensely self-conscious about their looks, or incredibly private, and hated the very idea of a permanent record of their image being made without their consent. Does my opinion of the unwitting subject's image take precedence over that of the subject themselves? And does a value judgement comparison between me (or the viewers of my photo) and the subject really matter, when surely the crux is that the person did not consent to my capturing their image in the first place?

All of this assumes that I will be doing nothing but sharing a photograph for aesthetic or artistic reasons. But what if (as in the case of many Facebook groups and internet forums) photographs are taken of people in order to mock them? Obese people, disabled people, financially deprived people are all victims of this kind of online targeted abuse. This is clearly (to my sensibilities at the very least) morally wrong. What of the thorny issue of satire, though? What of people who dress a certain way or practise a certain hobby, for instance, photographed unknowingly in order for their image to be shared for the mocking enjoyment of people they do not know? For many, this is of a higher order, and harmless fun. But something about it sticks in my craw. Partly and simply, because their picture has been taken and shared without their say so (and here I have no leg to stand on, given my history of taking street photos, although my photographs were never taken intentionally to mock). I would like to say now that the other part is because it smacks of playground bullying, and that kind of sophisticated bullying which does not involve fists and boots, but sly words and painful, pointed verbal blows. Except that the victim here is not cognizant of the fact. The techniques of bullying might be taking place, but without a knowing subject, becoming exercised about it is akin to anti-war protesters objecting to Army Training. It's redundant. So, surely it amounts to the kind of behind-the-back judgement and sniggering that might be undertaken over a pint in a pub when 'strangely' dressed or coiffed new punters pitch up. I have been in public places and bitched about strangers with friends in the past. I am fairly certain that in my salad days, when I was wont to dye my hair with lemon juice and wear baggy pastel shirts, it happened to me.

So, apart from the subject's lack of consent, what is the other part of me which finds this so insidious? I think it's less about the intent (mocking 'the other', for various reasons) than the fact that technology enables a permanence of process here. Taking the piss out of people we don't know out in the world is ephemeral. That kind of fleetingness befits everyday life. Strangers are meant to come and go, and despite our better natures we might occasionally judge, mock or laugh at people. But Time's Arrow points on, and we are soon distracted and subsumed by other concerns, large or small. The taking of a photograph (or occasionally a video) allows people to 'capture' (the verb is key) and freeze that subject, and social networking allows them then to share it, so that mockery is freed of the moment, and can be enjoyed at leisure, over and over, and reviewed whenever required. It's a subtlety which may not even deserve an ethical distinction (I shall leave that for the Moral Philosophers), but one which vexes me.

It's all a far cry from the very real ethical dilemma of taking photographs in developing nations, you might still attest; but the Devil is so very often in the detail.