Ethical Considerations for Images

While there is an expectation that being in the public sphere is a tacit agreement to being photographed or documented, we encourage you to consider issues of consent and privacy when publishing or presenting images with people. We encourage special consideration of:

• Context: is it a religious, sacred, or private space?
• Power dynamics: is it a context where scholars and archaeologists may have treated the local community in an exploitative or extractive manner? Is it a context where individuals depicted are engaged in protest or demonstrations? Or is it a context where individuals depicted in the image may be or have been discriminated against because of their identities? Would distributing an image showing a person put them at risk?
• Identifiability: are the people included in the photograph incidental and not identifiable, i.e., as part of a crowd, or with faces obscured? Or are the people identifiable as individuals, with portrait-level emphasis placed on their inclusion of the image? 

Could you edit or crop a photo to remove people from view? Could you capture an alternate view, or use a detail? Techniques like long-exposure, where the object remains still but the moving people appear blurry, can also help preserve privacy. Does adding additional photographs help better contextualize an image?

When working on sensitive subjects such as burial spaces or spaces with human remains,  private or ritual objects, or photography of war, violence, conflict, or protest, is it appropriate to include a high-res color photograph? Could a line drawing replace a photograph to help make your argument without recirculating a sensitive image? 

As part of our service for Custom Image Creation, the VRC can help edit images related to ethical considerations and/or create basic line drawings for members of the UChicago art history community. For more advanced custom imaging projects, we recommend reaching out to Dale Mertes, Visualization Specialist and 3D Animator, IT Services.

When editing images, especially those used for teaching and publication, be mindful of what changes you're making, and how editing could affect the overall meaning or impression of the image. Is the image supposed to be an authentic documentation of something? Or are you creating a new digital object? You will need to decide for yourself and your project if edits like removing people, cleaning up “imperfections” on an object, changing the layout, or editing colors changes the perception of the image or misleads the viewer. In some instances, you may want to consider describing the scope of your edits in the caption, text, or presentation. See the Image Citations and Captions page for more information.

If you are working on archaeological sites or culturally significant sites that are not well-known and whose location should not be widely publicized, consider removing GIS data from any photos that you might share with colleagues or students either through file transfers or slide decks. You could also consider turning off location tracking on your camera and your phone to not capture that data in the first place, but if having access to GIS data is important to your own project, you could capture images with location data and scrub/remove it before sharing the images.

This guide was prepared by the Visual Resources Center at the University of Chicago. Last updated 9/16/2025; first published 6/3/2022.