Ethical Issues Surrounding Disaster Photos

I find a lot of the photos coming out of the disaster area disturbing. Like the photo on today’s front page of the New York Times, showing a body floating face down. Or this photo on the Los Angeles Times Web site, which makes MSNBC.com’s precaution with a certain photo (12 in this slide show) — a photo that I’ve seen on other sites — seem almost quaint.

Photos like this (under Day Four, Evacuation, photo 2), in which another photographer is visible, make me wonder if people from the media are helping individuals in addition to reporting.

Back to the photo on the New York Times’ front page. It reminded me of photos the newspaper published of people falling from the top of the World Trade Center on 9/11. Or the picture of a dead Marine being dragged through the streets of Somalia. An ethics class that I took first semester took time to discuss the ethics of publishing provocative photos. Is it ethical if a person in distress or a corpse is identifiable in a photo? What if a person isn’t identifiable? Should such a photo run on the front page or inside the paper?

I don’t remember if the photos of people falling from the World Trade Center ran on the front page of the New York Times, but I’m a little shocked that they went with the photo that they did today. I know a lot of people have drowned in the flood, but I think this picture shouldn’t have been featured so prominently in the paper because the corpse is so visible. (The Los Angeles Times published a photo on its Web site in which a floating corpse, which one might be able to identify because of the woman’s clothing, is even more visible. I feel guilty for not being able to look away from the picture.)

I thought today’s discussion of race and Hurricane Katrina on the Brian Lehrer Show was interesting. You can listen to a stream of it or download it. The segment is called “Like Being in Steerage in the Titanic?”

Race and Hurricane Katrina

I’ve wondered why the images coming out of Hurricane Katrina seem to be dominated by black people — stranded on the highway, lingering at the Superdome, being rescued from the water and rooftops. The images that I can recall of white, non-elderly people show them retrieving possessions from flooded homes, protecting their businesses, or safe with relatives away from the disaster area.

I just heard a discussion with Leonard Pitts, Jr., who wrote the editorial “Katrina’s Eye Was Colorblind” in today’s issue of the Detroit Free Press.