The Notion of Consent in Contemporary Photography

” In recent years, the controversy that has preoccupied photojournalism and documentary photography is the manipulation and staging of images, and the success or failure of various attempts to address the problem. Yet, at the same time another controversy has been brewing, largely in the shadow of these debates, but rarely generating as much heat. The controversy? The problems with how we visually represent vulnerable and abused children.”

As an artist and person with disabilities, I have long come across media where it is likely that consent has not truly been given. Even when it is stated that it has, the photographed child or person with disabilities is often clearly vulnerable and may be unable to communicate consent at all or may lack understanding to give informed consent. 

Unfortunately, there has not been enough attention brought to the ways in which people with disabilities are portrayed in art. While the depictions of children have become a heavily discussed topic after the influx of mom video bloggers since 2010 and the subsequent arrest of Ruby Franke on six counts of child abuse in 2023, the disabled community are still often marginalized. 

Since the 20th-century, issues in disability art still persist where the disabled person is not the sole creator of a work. The notion of consent is the driving force. In photography, informed consent means that the person being photographed is knowledgeable of possible outcomes. This includes: 

”[the] permission that a person grants to be photographed, with full knowledge of where, when, how, and for what purpose the photographs will be used, and with the understanding that they can say “no” without consequence.”

Still, on some level, you would like to think that everyone, no matter their inward or outward appearance or age, deserves bodily autonomy, that is, the right to control what does or does not happen with regards to their own body including the depiction of it by artists seeking to use them as subjects. 

So often, people with disabilities are objectified and ridiculed in society. This is evident in the work of Diane Arbus, a 20th century American photographer, who some people believe was “influential” in photography. Was her work unique? Sure. However, nothing about photographing people with intellectual disabilities in costumes is socially or morally okay. Not only can the notion of consent be questioned in such cases, but the depictions of people who were already vulnerable after being institutionalized, were then further objectified by Arbus. It is known that the photographer often referred to her subjects as “freaks”, and in On Photography, Susan Sontag points out how Arbus’s work was “based on distance, on privilege, on a feeling that what the viewer is asked to look at is really other.” In philosophy, the concept of “otherness” seeks to define how minorities are viewed by the greater public. Otherness is often observed in museums, where disability art or African art may be on-view for a special history month or exhibition but never made a permanent part of a museum’s collection. 

In a 1974 paper, Diane Arbus: the gap between intention and effect, Judith Goldman discusses the harmful nature of Arbus’s work: "Her subjects were people on the edges – the physically malformed – dwarfs, midgets, giants, twins, and transvestites with sideshow relationships to society, and physically normal people, whose edge was a fact of their social class and whose condition, like the malformed, was loneliness and the psychological despair of boredom.”

You may be asking if, in 2023, dehumanizing portrayals of people with disabilities still occur? Look no further than Debe Arlook’s one, one thousand, a series selected for Photolucida’s 2022 Critical Mass Top 50 and International Photography Awards. In the artist statement, Arlook describes David as a 28-year-old person who is “non-verbal, experiences daily seizures, has scoliosis, severe autism, and requires 24-hour care.”Additionally, the artist made sure to include a statement that consent was given: “When I asked David’s permission to make this project, I did not know if he would respond. In a rare and astonishing gesture, he leaned toward me with sustained eye contact. I got my “yes.’” 

This brings up several important questions:

How can we assess that a “rare” encounter = consent? 

Even if nonverbal consent may be attributed to eye contact, is someone who is nonverbal with “severe” autism still able to give consent? 

In addition, we know that epileptic seizures, while they are occurring, alter sensorium. Is the subject’s staring off into the distance an absence seizure? And is a person having a seizure able to give consent? 

Was the consent informed knowledge of what photographs would be taken and how they would be used? 

In one photograph, the subject is noticeably naked, with his head turned away from the camera while refusing medication. In another, the subject is depicted looking off into the distance, wearing nothing but underwear, while his mother makes the bed. These portrayals do nothing but further vulnerability. 

“When disability is defined or approached using terms with negative connotations – as in “suffer from epilepsy”, “multiple sclerosis victim” or “wheelchair-bound” – discourses can contribute to constructing negative attitudes about disability and thereby affect the policies that are undertaken.”

The representation of disability is needed in media. We can use art to represent disability, raise awareness about issues in disability and educate others about misperceptions without the exploitation of the disabled person. When the depictions of disability are comical, exploitative, or otherwise offensive, no work has been done to improve the quality and treatment of people within the disability community.