What ethical questions are raised in the creative industries? [session one]

Fashion

• Fur - Animal cruelty and the use of animal product
• Thin catwalk models
• Plus size models
• Design brands exploiting cheap labour

Fashion has gained a bad reputation. It's known for being animal unfriendly, it pushes unhealthy body trends to the masses by pushing an ideal of beauty that is unrealistic to most people and produces images that can sometimes be misleading to certain groups of people. Some fashion designers such as Stella McCartney don't use leather or fur which raises the question about how modern fur is, however, it is rare to find many more fashion designers that will follow the same discipline as Stella McCartney. The death of a living creature to achieve a luxury good design is a disturbing idea all together.

Graphics

• Promoting anything bad for health
• Personal beliefs
• Airbrush and edit of the human body
• Deceiving images

Magazines and advertisements have long been criticized for promoting unrealistic, airbrushed images of beauty that no man or woman could possibly live up to. The main worry about these images is that they are putting pressure on young people to achieve an unachievable body stereotype which can cause problems such as anorexia and depression. In 2004, Dove launched 
a campaign that was very successful for real beauty which features real women, not models, to advertise Doves firming cream.  The advertisements focus on promoting real, natural beauty, in an effort to raise awareness of the unrealistically thin and unhealthy archetypal images associated with modelling and celebrities.


Photography 

• Nudity
• Airbrushing
• Permission and law issues
• Paparazzi

Photographs usually have more impact on people than words which is why for example images of a poor African children in the nude have been used as they help to illustrate the true problems and lifestyle that the people live and is also more likely to have an emotional impact on people, which is why those sort of images are used to promote charities. However many photographers fear that no matter how much care and consideration is taken in filming and photography, there is always going to be someone out there who thinks their violating the rights and disrespecting their subjects.


Ethics of digital image manipulation

Each newspaper, newsgroup or press association have its own rules and regulations regarding ethics in photojournalism. Today photographic manipulation is seen to be a new art form, but when it works its way into photojournalism and the media, there is an issue of fakery. How far can we take digital image manipulation and still maintain photographic integrity?

An example of what was has been seen as unacceptable photo manipulation is a fake photo on the cover of Newsweek magazine showing Princess Diana walking alongside Kate Middleton, this was widely criticized as being in poor taste. The cover photo was created to illustrate a story by Tina Brown speculating on what the future may have held for Princess Diana had she not died in 1997. However Tina Brown defended the cover when she stated “we wanted to bring the memory of Diana alive in a vivid image that transcends time and reflected my piece.”

When creating what could potentially be a good photograph, photojournalists need to take care that when they edit or stage a final image they ensure that they are doing it for technical issues and not for the purpose of altering the actual meaning of the image. Overall this can become difficult to decide where to draw the line, as every situation is different and this may not be as obvious to the person capturing the image at the time. 

Any industry that has such a heavy hand in image making has a certain responsibility in what image they make. All Designers hold responsibility for what message they send to the public and every consumer is responsible for their decisions.