The ethics of photojournalism. Is this photo ethical?
Useful info for food safety nuts (me)
Ezra Klein is starting a new venture. Hopefully, it will lead to some money gig for freelancers (me)
As the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, we’re going to see more austerity cookbooks. Check out her blog.
Apt. 11d 
If I understand correctly, those photographers were present when the girl was killed. Does that mean they stood by while she was beaten to death so they could get their picture? UNICEF has very clear guidelines about use of photos that are exploitative, even for fund-raising purposes, and this seems to go way beyond any threshold of decency.
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If she was already dead, I don’t see the lack of ethics. They’re documenting an event (and, I’d say a travesty). If there was still a possibility of saving a life, photos are a problem.
But, I also find the picture of the photographers fascinating, and we should see more of those, too.
On a related issue, on ethical photography, and Dunham and Jezebel, I think the mags should just release the pre-altered photos on a forum (after getting permission from their models). These days, the amount of re-touching of the photos they show for Dunham is nearly standard practice and just shows that photography is not a reflection of reality (which it never was). I don’t try to take “glamor” shots and mostly I photograph kids, but these days, if you are photographing anyone over 16, some amount of cleaning up of the picture, is expected.
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Not sure what to call it, but the advert by the article on the ethics of photojournalism is for portrait software on “cleaning” up portraits.
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Portrait professional, I’m checking out the trial version now. It basically does everything Vogue has done to Dunham’s face.
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Isn’t it more accurate to say, in the words of the old song, that the rich get richer and the poor get children? (Mostly out-of-wedlock children, and that is the reason they are poor.)
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“I’ve noted before that conservatives seem fixated on the notion that poverty is basically the result of character problems among the poor. This may once have had a grain of truth to it, but for the past three decades and more the main obstacle facing the poor has been the lack of jobs paying decent wages. But the myth of the undeserving poor persists, and so does a counterpart myth, that of the deserving rich.”
Quoting from the article Laura linked to
and, linked at that article
I’ve also been thinking a lot about this article “What Happens When the Poor Receive a Stipend?” in the NY Times. It details a study on a pre-post intervention population (the Eastern Cherokee in the Smokey mountains) by Duke University epidemiologist Jane Costello, before and after the opening of a casino that provided a stipend of about $6K/person to Cherokee families. The article describes both a longitudinal control group (the Cherokee before and after the casino opened) and other poor families in the same area.
The bottom line is that the stipend had a significant effect on child outcomes (so, to quote another aphorism, the rich and the poor are different — the rich have more money). In particular, the authors suggest that the amount of money had a significant effect on the parent’s ability to parent, relieving the stress of feeding and clothing their children and the boom and bust cycle of the previous work cycles.
(They are careful to say that this result can’t be used prescriptively — a significant factor in the casino effect might be the within community generation of the stipend — it’s not a handout, but a community owned business, a capital return).
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Yes, most of that research looking at the connection between character problems and poverty doesn’t have any way to get at which came first, the poverty or the bad habits, and there is ample evidence of causation going both ways, depending.
Anyway, I used to work on the same floor as the Smokey Mountain Study people.
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Yeah, I have the Smokey Mountains study up in another tab. I tweeted it out this morning.
I’m going on a poverty and food jag. That’s the topic of the week at Apt. 11D. On Thursday, I’m going to work in my dad’s food pantry. I’ll post pictures and tell you about on Friday.
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I think it’s pretty well-established that if you obey three simple rules, you will not be poor: (i) finish high school; (ii) don’t get married until you finish high school; and (iii) don’t have children unless you’re married. Jack Monroe violated rules i and iii, and now she’s poor. The behavior clearly preceded the poverty, since she grew up middle class and wasn’t poor until she violated the rules. There’s no vast, ineffable mystery about the causation here.
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On expired food, apparently my father’s office was near a supermarket, and they would discard recently expired packaged food by their dumpster, and my father would take it home and we would eat it. (He also got a TV that way). My mother told me this story. I had no idea my father was a dumpster diver, except that it doesn’t surprise me at all. He was extremely frugal in many ways that are embarrassing to middle class Americans. None of us have food allergies, except I’m not sure that’s anything more than correlation.
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You don’t see as many expired TVs in these days of preservative-laden appliances.
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