The Ethics of Photographic Collage
Photo collage by Savannah Dodd. Central image by Dai Kurokawa.
by Savannah Dodd
During the latest coronavirus lockdown in the UK and Ireland, my photography and arts practice took an unexpected turn. Unable to leave the house, except for essential travel or once-daily exercise, I struggled to find interest in the things around me. Taking inspiration from Irish artist Seán Hillen (and from a stack of two years’ worth of New Yorker and Economist magazines), I decided to try my hand at collage.
When I first began making collages, I viewed it as something primarily aesthetic that I was doing to whet my creative appetite while I was stuck indoors. But, as I became more engrossed in it, the work I was making became increasingly meaningful to me, and I wanted to share what I made. This is when ethical questions began to mount in my mind.
Authorship
Because I began working without the intention of sharing my work, I did not make note of the photographers’ names whose work I was cutting from. So, deciding whether to share this work presented an important question of authorship: is it ethical to share this work if I am unable to correctly attribute the original photographer?
There are a number of layers to this question, including the more legalistic question of copyright. Whether a photographer’s copyright is being infringed seems to depend on a number of factors, including how much of the original work is used, the visual relationship between the original and the collage, how the collage is made and used, and whether the collage is scanned or reproduced. There are a few blogs that are helpful for navigating this, like ArtLaw and The Legal Artist.
Copyright infringement also depends on whether the collage constitutes fair use. Fair use includes when the original work is being reproduced for the purposes of commentary or parody. The above collage may constitute fair use because it is a comment on the photojournalism industry, of which the original images are a part. But even if this example demonstrates the legal use of source material under fair use, that does not necessarily mean that it is ethical to do so.
Since beginning with collage, I have started photographing the full pages – before taking my scissors to them – in order to capture the image with its attribution. While attributing the elements of a collage to the original photographer would not negate any copyright infringement, it feels more ethical to acknowledge the photographer, at a minimum, or to reach out to the photographer to request permission.
The central element in the above collage was easy for me to identify as being by Dai Kurokawa because I knew that it was taken during the Riverside Attack in Nairobi in 2019. I reached out to Kurokawa for permission, but I have not yet heard back.
Decontextualisation
Cutting out a line of evacuees from a terrorist attack raises another critical ethical question about the decontextualization of trauma. In an article I wrote about press coverage of the Riverside Attack, I stress the importance of providing context in the wake of traumatic events. I call on editors to provide viewers with contextual information as a way of promoting empathetic engagement and preventing voyeurism, and I highlight the disparity in the amount of contextual information provided for white victims compared to Black victims.
While providing context is essential when reporting on traumatic events, is the need for context the same when an image is used as art? Are there times when decontextualisation is justified or not? Does the artist’s intention matter?
In the case of Alessio Mamo’s Dreaming Food, there was a tension between the artist’s intention and the ethics of the project’s execution. In response to this project, I wrote about the danger of using people’s images “to represent something that is about their lives, but which comes only from the photographer’s imagination.” I echoed Manali Shah and Harsha Vadlamani who criticise Mamo’s work for using “people as props” by failing to convey to the viewer any information about the actual individuals in the photographs.
My intention through the collage above is to provoke reflection about the processes through which photographs of trauma are made, about the white western gaze that is often invoked in those photographs, and about how we then look at and understand those photographs, as viewers. However, by decontextualising these people in my collage to make a wider point about the photography industry, am I making the same mistake of reducing them to props for my image?
Perhaps the kind of reflection that I intended to provoke through collage is more effectively done by photographs like the one by Nathan Weber. Following the earthquake in 2010, Weber photographed photographers as they photographed the body of Fabienne Cherisma who was killed in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. At the same time, images like Weber’s come with their own set of ethical considerations (which could be the topic of another article, altogether).
Aestheticization
Connected to the question of context is the question of aestheticization: is it ethical to re-contextualise an image of a traumatic event by using a scenic sunset as a backdrop? What does it mean to create a visually pleasing collage from an image rooted in trauma?
While I do not want to falsely equate photographic collage with documentary photography, this question reminds me of Susie Linfield’s The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence when she writes about the “fear of finding beauty in all the wrong places.” She describes the preference for photographs of trauma and suffering that are “hastily framed,” and the feeling that “if a picture seems sloppy, it’s okay to look.” She drives her point home with a particularly searing sentence: “It confuses moral weight with aesthetic clumsiness, and it is more concerned with the clear conscience of the viewer than with the plight of the injured subject.”
In order to understand how this applies to photographic collage, it might be useful to return to the work of Seán Hillen. In the recent documentary Tomorrow is Saturday, Hillen explains that he made fantastical collages from images of the Troubles in Northern Ireland out of “frustration” because “no one wanted to see” his photographs of the Troubles in the 1980s and early 90s. His collages pair photographs of Northern Ireland’s traumatic history with images of saints, space travel, and postcard-style land and cityscapes. He explains the rationale that underpins his work in an article by Marigold Warner: “I realised that I could penetrate the propaganda and the emotional armour that people had to build through the awful, awful conflict. People didn’t want to know about people who blew themselves up in restaurants. I realised that if I could make them laugh, I could get them to think.”
Conclusion
Adira Thekkuveettil and Amarnath Praful provocatively ask in their article on Soham Gupta’s Angst, “If an image is considered art, is it automatically insulated from any consequence or ethical responsibility?” I think it can be widely agreed that the answer is a resounding “no.” However, there may be differences in how we approach ethical responsibility when an image is considered art. I’ve tried to explore some of those differences here in reference to photographic collage. However, I believe that I have raised more questions than I have answered. By using this article as a forum to wrestle with these complex questions, I hope to provoke a thoughtful conversation about the ethics of photographic collage with the readers, and I look forward to hearing the thoughts of others.
