On Monday, 24 May 2021 at 7pm Bangkok time, Thammasat University students are cordially invited to participate in a free online public lecture on Do no harm: why we need photography ethics.
The Thammasat University Library collection includes many books on different aspects of photography as well as ethics.
Students may register for the event at this URL:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/do-no-harm-why-we-need-photography-ethics-tickets-153336346139
For any relevant questions or further information, please write to
The webinar is presented by the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, the United Kingdom.
As the announcement for the webinar Do no harm: why we need photography ethics, which raises questions and visual aspects of development and sociology, explains,
Photography can be an incredibly powerful tool to communicate and raise awareness about international development, humanitarian and social issues. But can we always assume that photography will do good? Or even more importantly, how can we ensure it does no harm?
Despite our best intentions to document these issues accurately, how we see and what images we take are highly subjective processes. Savannah Dodd will share her insights about how photo ethics can help us be more conscious about the choices we make, and how her own Anthropology background shaped her thinking on the topic.
Ms. Savannah Dodd is Director of the Photography Ethics Centre.
As its website notes,
The Photography Ethics Centre is dedicated to raising awareness about ethics and promoting ethical literacy across the photography industry. We do this through a variety of programmes, including online training, guest speaking, and interactive workshops.
Our Story
The Photography Ethics Centre was founded in 2017 in the midst of global events like the migration of Syrian refugees across the Mediterranean, the surge of violence against the Rohingya community in Myanmar, and the British secession from the EU. The pivotal role that photography plays in geopolitical events like these cannot be overstated. The impact of photographs can be both positive and negative, and can influence at every level from the personal to the global. Photographs have immense power. Photographs can stoke discrimination or influence policy to open doors for refugees. Photography has even played a role in ending war.
We looked for tools to help photographers harness this power and effectively navigate the complicated terrain of ethics amidst the democratisation of photography and the rise of social media. We came up empty. So we put together a training manual ourselves. We formed a team of photographers who care about ethics, but who come at it from different angles and with different kinds of expertise. We created something both theoretical and practical, that grapples with the big questions but is applicable on the ground.
We tested it in Chiang Mai, Thailand and Hanoi, Vietnam. We watched passionate discussions unfold between people who work in all genres and at all levels. We found that ethics is a topic that all photographers can engage with because all photographers have a stake in it. We found that ethics impacts everyone’s work, whether or not they are actively conscious of it. Most importantly, we found that the photographers who took our workshops left feeling that they had gained something.
It was the passion and energy that came out of the very first workshops that inspired us to create a system to make this training available to photographers around the world. And so the Photography Ethics Centre was born.
Our Social Enterprise Model
“Social enterprise is about changing the world through business. Social enterprises exist and trade not to maximise private profit, but to further their social and environmental aims. In short, social enterprise is about business where everyone profits.” (Claire Dove OBE DL, Social Enterprise UK)
The Photography Ethics Centre is a social enterprise whose aim is to raise awareness about photography ethics through educational training programmes. Our Social Enterprise model means that profits gained through our tariffed services enable us to offer our self-paced online training in the fundamentals of photography ethics for free to photographers around the world.
Why do we offer training for free? Because we think photography ethics is important, and we want people to learn about it. It’s as simple as that.
The Center defines photography ethics this way:
When we talk about photography ethics, we are talking about applying concepts like responsibility, power, and dignity to how we take and share photographs. Everyone will answer ethical questions in their own way, based on their own life experience, personal judgments, and photographic vision. Ethics are fluid, contextual, and subjective. That is why we do not give photographers a checklist of ethical guidelines.
Instead, we teach ethical literacy. Ethical literacy is about having the skills to make sound ethical decisions. These skills include things like critical thinking, situational awareness, and cultural sensitivity. We help photographers to develop skills to think critically about ethics in their work and the language to define their own ethical practice.
It is extremely difficult to make ethical decisions in the moment, and often these decisions have to happen in a split second. We present examples and raise questions so that photographers are better prepared to face ethical dilemmas when they occur.
Experience of working through difficult ethical considerations gives photographers tangible tools to be more effective in their work. It helps photographers to build relationships, to communicate effectively, and to gain access to communities in a socially responsible way. It also prevents photographers from unknowingly breaching national or international laws and ethical norms about privacy and confidentiality, consent, and child protection.
The speaker, Ms. Savannah Dodd,
is a documentary photographer and anthropologist. Her photographic work centres on personal projects that explore themes of health, family, and identity. She is currently working on a photobook about the lived experience of dementia, with funding from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and the Health and Social Care Research and Development Division of Northern Ireland.
She earned her master’s in anthropology and sociology at the Graduate Institute of International Development Studies in Geneva (2015) and her bachelor’s in anthropology and world religions at Washington University in St. Louis (2012). She is currently pursuing her PhD in anthropology at Queen’s University Belfast where she is examining the ethics of archiving photographs of civil conflict in post-conflict societies.
Savannah combined her knowledge of anthropology with her experience in photography when she founded the Photography Ethics Centre in 2017. Prior to founding the Centre, she worked in the development sector for NGOs and IGOs in Switzerland, Uganda, and Thailand.
In an online interview, Ms. Dodd observes that there are many useful crossovers between anthropology, journalism and visual studies.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)