Values & Character

Far to often I hear photographers pay lip service to ethics, or standards, yet, they fold under pressure, from themselves usually, and cave.

We see all too often, ethical breaches, the latest from Getty, where an image they represent editorially, of a football player was manipulated. (PDNOnline reports on this here.)

Values are not what you say, they are what you do, and how you act, and comport yourself. Here's a great link about "the power of personal values."

(Continued after the Jump)

Getty can suggest all they want that they're editorial department is in fact, editorial, but try a search for "NBA brawl" and you get only 16 images, of the press conference afterwards, and a few nice player images once they've returned after their suspensions. No images of the actual fight. A search on Google yields thousands of results. No doubt, many of them duplicates, but they're there. Where's the editorial independence? Oh, it's absent when you're selling images and the league doesn't want you to make them look bad.

Character, it's said, is who you are when no one's looking. So too are your values, which form your character, as do ethics.

P.F. Bentley, for example, has a lot of character. As I wrote here - At least the Hypocrite Knows Right from Wrong, P.F. did the right thing, and no one would have even thought about it if he'd just given in.

If your success is at the expense of your good values or ethics, then, what success is there, really?

As I've said before, the best approach to what we do is - "do well by doing good." Amen.

---

Please post your comments by clicking the link below. If you've got questions, please pose them in our Photo Business Forum Flickr Group Discussion Threads.