Sean Carney's Website

Recently I listened to a podcast of a talk held at Aqua books in 2007 entitled Famine Porn: The power of images which talked about the concept of 'Famine Pornography'.  This talk raised interesting questions concerning the use of pictures as a method to solicit donations, and the ethics of talking pictures of people who probably don't want their pictures to be taken.

The beginning of the talk concerns with how people in other cultures view photographs.  Comparing ourselves to other people we have a very liberal view of pictures.  We have cameras, we take pictures of every occasion and have them all over our homes.  Most people in the world cannot afford a camera and the only pictures they have are one or two posed studio portraits which are truly prized possessions.  When we travel and take pictures the locals can feel violated since they are not given time to clean up and change into their most formal clothes.  We rarely let people represent themselves as how they wish to be remembered.

The second half of the talk focuses more on how we as humans respond to images of disaster.  Whenever there is a accident on the highway everyone slows down and looks - we just can't help it.  For whatever reason the image of a bombed building is more enticing than a intact one, a starving child more interesting than a content one.  These images don't only arouse our curiosity but also our emotions in a powerful way.  The problem is that we can grow acclimatized to these images the more we see them, lowering their effectiveness and creating a need for even more graphic pictures to captivate our attention.

This talk was very striking for me since I could relate to it through some of my experiences. I have traveled to Egypt, South Africa and Uganda and I have always been a cowardly photographer. I felt that I was stealing pictures and images from people. After all, I didn't know these people, I didn't know their names, and as far as I was concerned, I didn't want to get close to them. Nearly all the pictures of day to day life I have in those countries were taken from a moving bus, covertly through the zipper of my backpack or using all of the zoom available on my camera. I never connected or asked permission. I used people.

The other thing that this talk brought into relief was my feelings and emotions around poverty. When I first saw substandard living conditions in Egypt many of my friends were deeply affected by it but I was not. This troubled me and it happened again when I was in South Africa and Uganda. I only rarely got a strong emotional response to what I saw. At times I felt numb, other times I felt like a monster for feeling numb. To me this is a very real example of how much I have been desensitized towards images of poverty in my life. All the World Vision commercials left me so that when I saw something close to the real thing, it was just another ad, just another commercial.

After listening to this I can certainly say that I will not view images in the media or take pictures of people in quite the same way as I did before. I hope that you listen to it too.