Photography Ethics Centre

Founded 2017
Website photoethics.org

Photography Ethics Centre seeks to change the way that the world takes and shares pictures by embedding a culture of ethics in photography.

The Photography Ethics Centre is a social enterprise organisation founded in 2017 by Savannah Dodd ¹. The Centre offers educational opportunities on the topic of photography ethics through vehicles like online courses, workshops, articles, and other multimedia educational content, including The Photo Ethics Podcast ². They also organise events, including the annual Photography Ethics Symposium ³.

Instead of approaching ethics as guidelines or rules, the Photography Ethics Centre promotes the cultivation of ethical literacy. Ethical literacy is about having skills, like critical thinking, situational awareness, and cultural sensitivity, to make sound ethical decisions. They do this by supporting photographers to develop skills to think critically about ethics in their work and the language to define their own ethical practice.

In 2022, they launched the Statement of Ethics campaign ⁴. A Statement of Ethics is a declaration of your ethical principles and a description of how you enact those principles in your photography practice. The purpose is to explore what ethics means in your practice for yourself, and then to share your commitment to ethics with others. This campaign is geared toward photographers, photo editors, curators, photo organisations, and any one else who maintains a practice working with lens-based media.

The Photography Ethics Centre works with a wide range of clients, both within Ireland and abroad. Previous clients include: World Press Photo, VII Insider, Royal Photographic Society, PhotoIreland, Belfast Photo Festival, University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, Queen’s University Belfast, and Ulster University.