Digital Photographers: Trust, Truth, and Copyright in the Digital Age
Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
9-16-2022
Editor(s)
Enrico Bonadio & Cristiana Sappa
ISSN
9781800881754
Publisher
Edward Elgar
Language
en-US
Abstract
Digital photographic technology has made us all into photographers and photographic audiences. But it has imperilled professional photographers as trustworthy digital-age storytellers. This chapter describes three years of field research and interviews with photographers. It focuses on three themes: (1) the value of labour and skill; (2) qualitative standards for photographic images and the development of professionalism among photographers; and (3) the problem of distorted or out-of-context photographs, which undermines the integrity of the photographer's work. The values to which photographers are professionally devoted, such as truth, fairness, and respecting skill, will resonate with ordinary working people who have experienced the joy and pain of the digital age. Broadly, the story photographers tell about threats today to the vitality and independence of professional photography is also a story about erosion of longstanding norms undergirding democracies and our struggles with technological 'progress' for sustainable twenty-first-century professional lives.
Recommended Citation
Jessica Silbey,
Digital Photographers: Trust, Truth, and Copyright in the Digital Age
,
in
The Subjects of Literary and Artistic Copyright
98
(Enrico Bonadio & Cristiana Sappa ed.,
2022).
Available at:
https://doi.org/10.4337/9781800881761.00015
