Quotes About Ethics

To photograph people is to violate them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.

Every collector is potentially (if not actually) a thief.

Photographs cannot create a moral position, but they can reinforce one-and can help build a nascent one.

When the right person does the wrong thing, it's the right thing.

Photographs that depict suffering shouldn't be beautiful, as captions shouldn't moralize.

Beautifying is one classic operation of the camera, and it tends to bleach out a moral response to what is shown. Uglifying, showing something at its worst, is a more modern function: didactic, it invites an active response. For photographs to accuse, and possibly to alter conduct, they must shock.

One can feel obliged to look at phototgraphs that record great cruelties and crimes. One should feel obliged to think about what it means to look at them, about the capacity actually to assimilate what they show. Not all reactions to these pictures are under the supervision of reason and conscience.

SavaÅŸ fotoÄŸraflar?nda güzellik görmek, kalpsizlikle eÅŸ anlaml? say?lmaktad?r.

To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.

Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it - say, the surgeons at the military hospital where the photograph was taken - or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be.

That being said, one person's "barbarian" is another person's "just doing what everybody else is doing." (How many can be expected to do better than that?) The question is, Whom do we wish to blame? More precisely, Whom do we believe we have the right to blame? The children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were no less innocent than the young African-American men (and a few women) who were butchered and hanged from trees in small-town America.

To take a picture is to have an interest in things as they are, in the status quo remaining unchanged, to be in complicity with whatever makes a subject interesting, worth photographing-including, when that is the interest, another person's pain or misfortune.

Central to modern expectations, and modern ethical feeling, is the conviction that war is an aberration, if an unstoppable one. That peace is the norm, if an unattainable one. This, of course, is not the way war has been regarded throughout history. War has been the norm and peace the exception.

our capacity to respond to our experiences with emotional freshness and ethical pertinence is being sapped by the relentless diffusion of vulgar and appalling images

Images of the sufferings endured in war are so widely disseminated now that it is easy to forget how recently such images became what is expected from photographers of note.

Hakk?n ve hakl?l???n bir tarafta, bask? ve adaletsizliÄŸin diÄŸer tarafta yer ald???na ve kavgan?n sürdürülmesi gerektiÄŸine inananlar aç?s?ndan önemli olan, tam da kimin, kim taraf?ndan öldürüldüÄŸüdür.

The ethical task of the modern writer is to be not a creator but a destroyer - a destroyer of shallow inwardness, the consoling notion of the universally human, dilettantish creativity, and empty phrases.

Sufrir es una cosa; otra es convivir con las imágenes fotográficas del sufrimiento, que no necesariamente fortifican la conciencia ni la capacidad de compasión. También pueden corromperlas. Una vez que se han visto tales imágenes, se recorre la pendiente de ver más. Y más. Las imágenes pasman. Las imágenes anestesian.

camera is a kind of passport that annihilates moral boundaries and social inhibitions

This very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads-as an anthology of images.

Hay algo depredador en la acción de hacer una foto. Fotografiar personas es violarlas, pues se las ve como jamás se ven a sí mismas, se las conoce como nunca pueden conocerse; transforma a las personas en objetos que pueden ser poseídos simbólicamente. Así como la cámara es una sublimación del arma, fotografiar a alguien es cometer un asesinato sublimado, un asesinato blando, digno de una época triste, atemorizada.

Just being a good person doesn't necessarily entitle you to a good life.

It? You mean preserving a zygote or blastula or whatever? That's their moral obligation? Not their obligation to a living, breathing woman who just got raped?

the administrator was known to be an extreme antichoice activist who insisted that a ball of cells the size of a garbanzo bean should supersede the will of a living, breathing woman.