Came across this today: http://oml.bnn.nlThe site is of a television show in The Netherlands that follows terminally ill people to their deaths. The Netherlands is the country that invented the reality TV genre, and have legalized euthanasia, thus a show like this should not be a surprise. It is also so actually in keeping with the country's 'dialogue' culture. Their political system is based on conversation, dialogue and discussion; everyone's opinion is to be heard. Is this a series that is representing different opinions on euthanasia? Is there a dominant discourse being presented? What ethical debates have there been related to the representation of these individuals and their deaths? Representations of dying. Photography of dying. In higher resource countries, there is a growth in the number of visual representations of end of life. Art exhibitions, reality television shows, socio-political awareness campaigns, documentaries focused on the dying, their rights, their experiences, their hopes are becoming more and more. The issues in these countries is to raise awareness of palliative care, right to die movements etc. How do developments in these areas relate to images of suffering, dying and death used by humanitarian healthcare organizations? How do the debates in the use of representations of suffering bodies by humanitarian healthcare organizations relate to the representations of dying in resource rich countries? These are questions I am asking myself. These are questions I want to explore. For the moment, however, I am going to explore the experiences by photographers when photographing dying people. Here are a few people I will draw on: Walter Schels, an artist, who created a photographic exhibit about 'life before death.' Greg Southam, a photojournalist with the Edmonton Journal, who photographed Barb Tarbox, an anti-tobacco activist whose deathbed photograph appear now on the recent series of Health Canada anti-tobacco health-warning labels. But how does this relate to a war photographer's photographs of dying and death? Or those of a photojournalist photographing suffering in resource poor areas, times of crisis or contexts of extreme deprivation? I keep coming back to Tim Hetherington's essay in the book Photographs Not Taken, where he explores the debate he had with himself over not being able to reprint images he had of dead US soldiers when he had no problems reprinting images of dead Liberian fighters. Is this a sign of the crux of the ethical debates in these images of dying, death, suffering? Is it ultimately an issue of race/colonialism/imperialism? What else is involved? When ethics is invoked, whose ethics is it? Is it still a western/eurocentric ethics? Is there a humanitarian ethics myth? Is there a photojournalism ethics myth? How does that translate into practice? What do people in the photographs think? So much to think about.
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