Visual Ethics Theory

Kuliah Etika Profesi dan BisnisOleh Coky Fauzi Alfi

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Visual Ethics Theory

Topics

• Why is Visual Ethics Important?• Define: Visual Ethics• Ethics: Visual Production and Reception• Human Visual Behavior

Why is the Visual Ethics Important?

• Seeing is believing• Pictures are often more powerful than

words• Visual images require as many choices as

words do

Define: Visual Ethics

Visual ethics is the study of how images and imaging affect the ways we think, feel, behave, and create, use, and interpret meaning, for good or for bad.

• Visual ethics is not just digital ethics, or truth in advertising, public relations or TV journalism.

• Visual ethics is not just avoiding imagery that stereotypes or imagery that subjugates others.

• Visual ethics is about the soul of communication, "the eyes are the windows to the soul."

Ethics: Visual Production and Reception

Ethics of Visual Production

• Ethical issues involved in the production of visual images.– How do representations in newsmedia deploy cultural

codes of race, class, ethnicity, gender, and so on in order to create distance from or empathy with specific people and groups?

– How can visual representations of the other facilitate or foreclose certain ethical responses from viewers?

– When is it ethically justifiable to capture and share images of another person in a moment of vulnerability?

– With whom should such images be shared?

Ethics of Visual Reception

• Visual ethics is equally concerned with the ethics of reception, that is, with seeing as an ethical act.– How do different images influence our ethical responses

and moral behavior in different ways?– To what extent do our ethical responses to images take

place pre-reflectively, by visual-perceptual processes in the body-mind, before images even come to consciousness?

Human Visual Behavior

Ecology of the Visual

Thinking of visual ethics in terms of ecological theory focuses attention on the dynamic processes of making meaning in visual ways.

Surface attending and perceiving

recognizing, translating, recording

construct, create, conceptualize, manipulate

dynamic process of being, interacting, and meaning making

Layers ofEcology of the Visual

Ethical Process and Meaning

Unethical Process but Ethical Meaning

Ethical Process but Unethical Meaning

Unethical Process and Unethical

Meaning

The Matrix of Process and Meaning

Unethical Process but Ethical Meaning

Ethical Process but Unethical Meaning

Ethical Process but Unethical Meaning

Ethical Process but Unethical Meaning

Ethical Process but Unethical Meaning

Unethical Process but Ethical Meaning

Unethical Process and Unethical Meaning

Unethical Process and Unethical Meaning

Unethical Process and Unethical Meaning

Some manipulations are okay:• Intensifying colors for reproduction• Eliminating “red eye” from electronic

flash• Blurring of offensive body parts

• An image is not the result of but part of the ecology of the visual, part of the process of meaning making.

• The power of the visual is that it makes visible in some way that which has been invisible.

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