Photo-Graphy, “The Shadow In The Cave,” Its Pain And Love: The ethics of photography

This paper maps out photography’s newer ethics by examining Boris Mikhailov’s Case History that often stirs controversy over its bold depiction of human misery. The paper criticizes the idea that photographers should not represent “the other’s pain”: an idea that has sabotaged the medium’s inherent visual desire in order to prioritize its moral responsibility. In that idea is found a resilient Platonic antagonism against image, a logo-centric prejudice that marks a biased demarcation between art and politics in photography theory. The paper challenges this photographic Platonism through recent arguments that illuminate the medium’s inter-regimic, dialectical, redemptive roles (Jacques Ranciere, Walter Benjamin, Ariella Azoulay, et al.). With this theoretical challenge, the paper aims to outline a new ethics of photography for an era in which the image’s “pandemic” growth is resetting the mode of human communication and the role of photography.