Ethical Photography Part I: Your Own Children

I have been thinking quite a bit about the ethics of photography. What is ethical? What is unethical? Where is the line?
Is it okay to take photographs of your child’s every waking moment? I always kid around that for a child of a scrapbooker to rebel, all she or he would need to do is refuse to be photographed, refuse to where clothing that coordinates with the rest of the family, or refuse to make an acceptable face.

What about publishing photographs of your children? There are many blogs written by parents that use photographs of their children. I used to keep a blog like this to update the family, who lived across the country. I quickly realized that they weren’t even reading that blog, so I gave it up. What about social networking sites? My profile photograph is of my daughter. I changed my photo once to a nature scene and my sister posted on my wall within minutes. She lives across the country and couldn’t stand not seeing a photograph of her niece.

Scrapbooking revolves around photographs. Most scrapbook pages contain photographs. Most published scrapbook pages (in idea books, blogs, and magazines) contain photographs of the scrapbooker’s family (I have no evidence to back this up, but it seems to be fairly accurate). Scrapbook pages of cute kids sell. I can’t help but wonder where the line is though between clean fun and exploitation. If I earn a living as a scrapbooker, who publishes pages of my children (and the children makes no money from this), is it exploitation? At what point would the scrapbooker be no different than Jon and Kate? I’m still on the fence. I really do not no where the line is here. I also do not see anyone talking about this issue. Perhaps this is one of those questions that shouldn’t be asked because we don’t want to know the answer. Is it ethical to publish any photographs of your children to the internet? Under what conditions?

You will notice that on this blog, I have published only a couple of photographs. I plan to include more photographs because I think it makes the blog more aesthetically pleasing. I still haven’t decided, however, what role photographs of my child should play on this blog. She is far too young to consent. Thoughts?

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