It could happen to anyone of us.

Salacious photos are not something to generally be given the time of day.  When the topic comes up as part of another 'scandal' in politics or a celebrity's life, I tend to shake my head and wonder what the person was thinking.

Notwithstanding this, a subplot running through this week's 'The Newsroom' episode was cause for reflection, particularly around this idea (or myth!) of privacy in today's world.

The subplot in question was explosively introduced in the opening scene. Nude photos of one of the characters, Sloan (a respected TV anchor), had been posted up on a site.  These photos quickly went viral, and the channel is left to deal with the results.  The interesting thing about these photos was that they were taken with her consent by an man she was dating and trusted implicitly at the time.  When she dumped him, he took the due 'revenge' he felt was 'owed' to him through by utterly humiliating her.

'I am feeling something very I don't know how to describe right now', Sloan says on the show.

Betrayal perhaps?  Insecurity? Utter helplessness?  One can only imagine what it must feel like to have a truly intimate moment be broadcast online.

Her confidante at the time said it was rage - or will quickly turn into rage.  Sloan finishes the episode in the boardroom of said jilted lover, punching him out and getting a little revenge of her own.

***

There are a number of interesting readings of this plot.  Sloan's character is a genius; she's a well respected economist and commands audiences of hundreds of thousands.  Surely, a thirty year old highly educated woman wouldn't put herself in this situation.  Surely she would think to delete identifying photos if they were taken, even if she had consented?

Well if recent history is anything to go by, people do very silly things with cameras and phones without seeming to think about the consequences (or in the case of Anthony Weiner, even seeming to care). In this case however, Sloan wasn't doing anything technically 'wrong', so that argument is less substantial.  It does raise the question about the line between an individual's public and personal life though, particularly in an age where this is becoming increasingly blurred.

She sights her implicit trust in this guy as the reason she didn't expect this sort of revenge. 'It wasn't a bad breakup - but even if it were, would this be okay?!', she asks, and rightly so!  Humiliation and the essential defamation can regularly - and do regularly - annihilate reputations.  We all know that reputations are the easiest things to damage and the most difficult to repair.  So the act of distributing the photos we can agree, is immoral.

Is it criminal?

Whose responsibility is it to ensure these things don't happen?

Is your privacy always your individual responsibility or should is there an implicit trust in relationships with people - and institutions - that should also bear part of the burden?

It feeds into a larger question about an individual's right to privacy, particularly with the exposing of PRISM, the actions of the NSA and even the likes of Google implying that privacy online is a myth.

Unfortunately, it is increasingly difficult to effectively operate in this society without being online.  So how does one walk the line?  Are we all to always be on-guard and take precautions, accepting that being selective about what we share - even to our closest friends - is never really actually private?

What will happen when people growing up in this online society become leaders of state?  Will there never be any surprises because everything is already online? Will our moral appetites change because we become accustomed to every single infraction being displayed and obsessed with the world over?  Or will there be an industry based around the erasure of online profiles to give people an opportunity to 'start afresh'.

What do you think?

***

Shoot the Messenger?

"Everybody, at the end of the day wants to come back with the best shot." The Bang Bang Club.

Wow, does this film give some food for thought.

Where …are they getting the guns?

What …do you care man, it doesn’t matter. Just take the picture!

***

The movie, The Bang Bang Club, follows the lives of four war photographers during the apartheid in South Africa and their adventures while they attempted to record and broadcast the events of the conflict through image.

Although the film did capture part of the emotional journey, the film makers did not interrogate the moral and ethical dilemmas as deeply as they could have.  Instead, the film chooses to follow the stories of the men more generally and to refer to greater issue indirectly.

This doesn’t detract completely however from the question underlying the film: what is the role of photojournalist in a war zone, a person driven by humanity or by the passion and job description?

How then, does that fit in with moral and ethical expectations that we have as a society?

***

Kevin Carter, one of the four members of the club profiled in the film, committed suicide shortly after being awarded the Pulitzer Prize for taking a photo of a starving child in Southern Sudan.

The guilt of not doing anything to save the child, and moreover being constantly asked and berated for his “inhumanity” was said to be his undoing.

…But who are we, as mere observers, to tell people like conflict photographers what they should and shouldn’t do in the line of duty?  How would we know what we would do in such a position?

The more important question is…Should they interfere? Are we allowed to judge them as we do if they do not?

It is interesting to read interviews with the journalists themselves, years after the fact.  For example Greg Marinovich speaks below about the piece “Mob Attack”.

***

…the door was flung open and this guy with a scarf tied like a turban around his head came dashing out. He looked me straight in the eyes, and then took off.

All these other men started chasing him, and he hadn't gone far when he was brought down. About 15 or 20 men were all around him, hitting and stabbing and clubbing. And I was right there, photographing it. On the one hand, I was horrified, and at the same time I was thinking: what should the exposure be?

It was the old days: analogue, manual focus, crappy cameras. I felt torn between the horror of what I was seeing and trying to capture it. I was also thinking, how am I going to survive this? Because sooner or later these people are going to say, "There's this guy taking pictures of us committing murder." I was 1km from my car and the nearest outsider.

They killed him. And then one of them turned and said, "The white guy's photographing." Everyone leapt away, and I said, "No, it's fine, it's fine. Why did you kill him? Who is he?"

It was my first exposure to such a thing. And although, as a journalist, my reaction was fine, as a human being I felt I'd really let myself down [emphasis added]. It wasn't how I'd expected I'd react – I thought I'd try to intervene, or do something more noble. Yet I hadn't. I was really quite torn up about that. I was gutted that I'd been such a coward. From that moment, I was determined that, no matter what, I'd try to intervene and save someone if I could.

***

Greg’s Photo

It cannot be easy, and it isn’t an area with black and white distinctions; war never is.  It is easy for those sitting in comfortable chairs at home to disparage decisions made in the heat of the moment of an intense conflict zone.  The fact of the matter remains that without photojournalists, journalists and the men and women who put themselves in the line of fire to report, we would never have records of the atrocities that occur around the world.

As a society, we send soldiers out to fight on behalf of our “freedom”, but then avoiding dealing with the effects of war on a conscious.  Similarly, I believe these photographers, and many journalists in similar situations around the world, sacrifice a part of themselves for what they believe is a greater cause.  It is a sacrifice they have volunteered, and sometimes, they pay the ultimate price.

Whether we agree with their actions in the heat of the moment is a speculative, and a question of morals and values based on the individual.  Either way, we as a society should be grateful.

***

Read more about this fascinating topic via the links below:

NPR Podcast

New York Times

Greg Marinovich

Joa Silvia

Movieline Review

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