Santiago Lyon: On trusting what we see

In this episode, we talk with Santiago Lyon about trusting what we see. Discussing his own work with the Content Authenticity Initiative, he stresses the need for provenance information to be available to consumers.  Santiago highlights the importance of clarifying the differences between photojournalism and stock photography as they entail differing ethical considerations. He also explores the influence of context, usage and intent in relation to ethics.  Santiago invites photographers to embrace AI while also discussing the difficulty it poses to intellectual property.

What you’ll find inside: 

“For me the whole career aspect of journalism was more of a vocation and more of a calling than a sort of 9-5 job. And with that vocation comes the responsibility to adhere to those codes of ethics and to be truthful and transparent and not to mislead people and to be sure that all the work that you’re doing is a faithful recording of what’s going on around you.” (7.03)

“A stock photograph has all sorts of ethical issues from the photojournalistic standpoint, the way it was edited, what might have been taken out of it for stock photo purposes et cetera. And the fact that the captions in stock photography are very different from the captions in new photography. So, the context becomes very important, you know context in news photography is everything.” (15.46)

“Customers know based on the source whether it’s AP or Reuters or AFP that it’s a trustworthy reliable image. So, the basic commodity that they’re dealing with in that world and in journalism at large is the notion of trust, and it’s hugely important.” (19.03)

“We like to think about it like a digital national label… for news content it’s important that people have access to this provenance information so that they can make better informed decisions about what to trust and what not to trust.” (20.50)

“It’s a question of whether you can embrace the power of technology and still be true to your values wherever they may lie. Whether it’s in the journalism world or the creative world or anything else for that matter.” (37.01)

What does photography ethics mean to Santiago? 

“I mean to me photography ethics is really about veracity and transparency and accuracy and context and when someone looks at a picture that they have all of that information at their disposal and can trust the image that they’re looking at…. For me it really means photographing things as they are and describing them as they are. Having that level of transparency while at the same time allowing for layers of creativity that can interpret the scene in a way that renders it compelling to the viewer without compromising the authenticity of the scene.” (44.11)

Links:

Content Authenticity Initiative 

Associated Press

Reuters

AFP

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