Larry Gross, John Stuart Katz, Jay Ruby (eds.): Image Ethics: The Moral Rights of Subjects in Photographs, Film, and Television (1991)

This pathbreaking collection of thirteen original essays examines the moral rights of the subjects of documentary film, photography, and television. Image makers–photographers and filmmakers–are coming under increasing criticism for presenting images of people that are considered intrusive and embarrassing to the subject. Portraying subjects in a “false light,” appropriating their images, and failing to secure “informed consent” are all practices that intensify the debate between advocates of the right to privacy and the public’s right to know. Discussing these questions from a variety of perspectives, the authors here explore such issues as informed consent, the “right” of individuals and minority groups to be represented fairly and accurately, the right of individuals to profit from their own image, and the peculiar moral obligations of minorities who image themselves and the producers of autobiographical documentaries. The book includes a series of provocative case studies on: the documentaries of Frederick Wiseman, particularly Titicut Follies ; British documentaries of the 1930s; the libel suit of General Westmoreland against CBS News; the film Witness and its portrayal of the Amish; the film The Gods Must be Crazy and its portrayal of the San people of southern Africa; and the treatment of Arabs and gays on television. The first book to explore the moral issues peculiar to the production of visual images, Image Ethics will interest a wide range of general readers and students and specialists in film and television production, photography, communications, media, and the social sciences.

Publisher Oxford University Press US, 1991
ISBN 0195067800, 9780195067804
400 pages

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Eric Michaels: Bad Aboriginal Art: Tradition, Media, and Technological Horizons (1994)

“Bad Aboriginal Art is the extraordinary account of Eric Michaels’ period of residence and work with the Warlpiri Aborigines of western Central Australia, where he studied the impact of television on remote Aboriginal communities.

Sharp, exact, and unrelentingly honest, Michaels records with an extraordinary combination of distance and immersion the intervention of technology into a remote Aboriginal community and that community’s forays into the technology of broadcasting. Michaels’s analyses in Bad Aboriginal Art will disrupt and redirect current debates surrounding the theory and practice of anthropology, ethnography, film and video making, communications policy, and media studies—no less than his work has already disrupted and redirected the cultural technologies of both the Warlpiri and Australian technocrats.”

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 1994
ISBN 0816623414, 9780816623419
203 pages

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Chris Jenks (ed.): Visual Culture (1995)

In Visual Culture the ‘visual’ character of contemporary culture is explored in original and lively essays. The contributors look at advertising, film, painting and fine art journalism, photography, television and propaganda. They argue that there is only a social, not a formal relation between vision and truth. A major preoccupation of modernity and central to an understadning of the postmodern, ‘vision’ and the ‘visual’ are emergent themes across sociology, cultural studies and critical theory in the visual arts. Visual Culture will prove an indispensable guide to the field.

Publisher Routledge, 1995
ISBN 0415106230, 9780415106238
Length 269 pages

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