Ethical Considerations for Images

This page compiles a variety of resources related to ethical considerations for creating, editing, circulating, and publishing images and photographs in an art history visual resources collections context. VRC Staff are not authorities on the topic, but we are invested in educating ourselves on the topic as part of our Commitment to Ethical and Anti-Racist Digital Stewardship. We are publishing this list for two reasons: 1) in an effort to be transparent about the work that has inspired our thinking and practices as well as to document the limitations of our current understanding of the topic; and 2) with the hope that it will be of use to others in the UChicago art history community. 

This list also serves as a parallel resource to our doc, VRC Critical Cataloging Resources, which focuses on how works of art, architecture, and archival materials can be more ethically described. We hope these considerations and resources will help you reflect and determine your own ethical practices for using images in your publications and presentations and to be an active steward of the images you create and circulate. We also encourage you to discuss with your advisor and research current practices in your subfield.

This list is not exhaustive, we welcome your suggestions and questions at any time. Please write to visualresources@uchicago.edu if you have any additional resources to share or ideas to include on this list. [Last updated 9/7/22]

• Standards for the Practice of Art History, College Art Association, revised and retitled, 2014
  • Statement on the Importance of Documenting the Historical Context of Objects and Sites, 2004. 
  • Statement Concerning the Acquisition of Cultural Properties Originating from Abroad, from Indigenous Cultures, and from Private Collections During the Nazi Era, revised 2016.
     
• Statement Concerning the Treatment of Human Remains, The Society for American Archaeology, April 2021
   
• AAM Code of Ethics for Museums, American Alliance of Museums, amended 2000
   
• Framework for Visual Literacy in Higher Education, a companion document to the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy in Higher Education, 2022. The Framework identifies several knowledge practices and dispositions of learners related to ethics, including that learners who are developing their visual literacy: 
  • Prioritize ethical considerations for cultural and intellectual property when creating, sharing, or using visuals.
  • Understand that ethical and legal frameworks for accessing and sharing visuals are not universal but vary by country and global region
  • Prioritize ethical information practices for use, attribution, and remix when they conflict with aesthetic preferences or creative objectives for visuals.

• Temi Odumosu, The Crying Child: On Colonial Archives, Digitization, and Ethics of Care in the Cultural Commons, Current Anthropology, vol. 6, suppl. 22, October 2020.
• The Artifact Lab, Respecting human remains: Edits to past blog posts, Penn Museum, May 6, 2021. 
• Caswell, Michelle. Archiving the Unspeakable: Silence, Memory, and the Photographic Record in Cambodia. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014.
• Guidelines for Ethical and Culturally Sensitive Photography, Carolina Global Photography Competition, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

GIS and GPS Data

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. 

Editing Images

When editing images, especially those used for teaching and publication, you’ll want to be mindful of what changes or "improvements" 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.

Depicting People

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 1) the context: is it a religious, sacred, or private space? 2) 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? 3) 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? 

Depicting Human Remains and Sensitive Sites, Objects

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 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. (We’re happy to introduce you, if you’d like!) Similarly, if you do not have access to Adobe Photoshop or other photo editing software and would like help editing or cropping images related to ethics and would like to collaborate with the VRC, we can help you.

Digital sovereignty refers to the right of Indigenous peoples to autonomously how cultural heritage is owned, collected, accessed, and used. Could a community-created image stand in for an outsider work? In cultivating an ethical image practice, we recommend looking to community-based advocacy groups and initiatives to see how they are advocating for access, priorities, and values for image use related to their cultural heritage. Here are a few examples:

Indigitization is an effort to provide tools, grant funding, training, and information sharing for Indigenous communities to digitize, manage, and sustain their materials. Follow them on Instagram @in.digitization. 

Mukurtu is an open-source platform built with Indigenous communities to manage and share digital cultural heritage. The platform incorporates several technologies to share Indigenous cultural heritage responsibly, ethically, and appropriately, with different layers of access for members of the community and outsiders and the opportunity to include multiple metadata records for each item so multiple stories and perspectives can be shared. Mukurtu also incorporates Traditional Knowledge (TK) Labels. Mukurtu is similar to other cultural heritage content management systems (CMS) such as Omeka, CollectiveAccess, LUNA, and others, except Mukurtu centers the needs and values of Indigenous communities in every design element and technical feature, including metadata schemas. 

TK Labels is a project from Local Contexts to “identify cultural material that has community-specific conditions regarding access and use.” Similar to a copyright statement, the TK Labels are included within digital systems to emphasize Indigenous rules and protocols and “promote new standards of respect.” Local Contexts was founded in 2010 “to enhance and legitimize locally based decision-making and Indigenous governance frameworks for determining ownership, access, and culturally appropriate conditions for sharing historical, contemporary and future collections of cultural heritage and Indigenous data.”

While the VRC is most familiar with scholarship in the professional literature related to collections and archives, we are also invested in following art historical scholarship and research related to the ethics in image creation, presentation, and circulation. Below are a few projects:

• Visual Regimes of Enslavement and Their Afterlives, Neubauer Collegium 
• Mlondolozi Zondi, Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Southern California. Mlondolozi (Mlondi) Zondi is a scholar and interdisciplinary artist whose research focuses on contemporary Black performance and art history. Zondi is currently working on a book project titled Unmournable Void, a study of critical artistic practices that tend to the historical conditions of anti-black violence resulting from transatlantic slavery, colonialism, and apartheid.