Photography Ethics Centre

We are a social enterprise organisation dedicated to raising awareness about ethics in photography. The Photography Ethics Centre was founded in 2017 in the midst of global events like the mass 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.