Future directions of professional photographers: A case study of changing hats between journalism and humanitarian photography

During the past decades, the number of nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) has increased remarkably worldwide, the advocacy sector has professionalised and institutionalised, and NGO work has been increasingly incorporated in governance (Chouliaraki & Vestergaard, 2021; Lang, 2013; Powers, 2018; Waisbord, 2011). Consequently, NGOs have put more efforts into communication, which has meant, for example, that NGOs have hired communication professionals, such as journalists and professional photographers, and increased their visibility in social media along with other channels. This might be a win-win for both the NGOs and the media professionals. For example, those professional photographers who have accepted invitations for NGO assignments have valued the NGOs’ organisational structures, guaranteeing security and providing knowledge and access to the field, while the NGOs have benefited from the high-quality professional photography, and in some cases also the reputation of the recognised photographers (Dencik & Allan, 2017).

By hiring communication professionals, NGOs strive for high quality material and a wider media publicity for the issues that are important from their perspective. Earlier research has found, however, that NGOs have struggled to gain media visibility on their own terms, and therefore, NGOs mainly adopt the established news norms to get publicity (Powers, 2015). Lang (2013) argued that NGOs are marginalised in news media, because national governments and established interest groups are ranked higher as news sources than civil society. In addition, NGOs might lack professional media relations, or they might not be actively seeking media publicity.

This study explores the intersection of media and NGO work from the viewpoint of photographers and other visual professionals. The research is based on qualitative interviews with Finnish visual professionals who have worked for both humanitarian NGOs and the news media. I focus on the visual professionals’ work from the perspective of NGO communication and aim to shed light on their work practices and professional values when they are employed by or assigned to humanitarian NGOs (i.e., they produce visual content primarily for NGO communication purposes). These visuals are published on the NGOs’ own communication channels, such as bulletins, newsletters, fundraising letters and posters, marketing material, social media channels, as well as on the websites of the major funders of NGO projects. Thus, the work introduced in this study could be described as humanitarian photography, which simply refers to photography that is mobilised “in the service of humanitarian initiatives across state boundaries” (Fehrenbach & Rodogno, 2015a: 1). This definition of humanitarian photography carries with it the long history of humanitarians and humanitarian organisations utilising photographs to increase public awareness and raise funds to relieve human suffering (Fehrenbach & Rodogno, 2015a: 1–6).

Occasionally, some of these NGO images get published in journalistic media, since the studied NGOs offer them free of charge to media organisations. Sometimes, the interviewed professionals also use their personal contacts in the media organisations and get some of their material published in the mainstream media, while the material is primarily produced from the premises of NGO communication. In such cases, NGO photographs and videos are possible to understand as parts of humanitarian journalism. For example, Scott, Wright, and Bunce (2021) have defined humanitarian journalism from three approaches: 1) as journalistic reporting about humanitarian actors and events, 2) as a form of journalism that puts the principles of humanitarianism into practice, or 3) as journalism that conforms to ethics of kindness to all human beings universally.

In the context of this research, the latter two approaches best describe the basis on which the visual content is produced in NGO communication. When the interviewed professionals work for humanitarian NGOs, they are committed to humanitarian values, such as helping people in distress by fostering solidarity, dignity, and human rights protection (e.g., ICRC, 2020). Meanwhile, similar principles may sometimes also be adopted by journalists who cover humanitarian issues (Scott et al., 2021), and the interviewees of this research may practise somewhat similar ethics when they work for journalistic media.

The starting point for this research was my observation from the interviews that the visual professionals occasionally struggle with the different professional values and ethics when they work for different employers. It has also been found in earlier research that when photographers work in crisis zones, they often end up in the intersection of different professional ethics. Calain (2013) studied this intersection from a medical ethics perspective and found that humanitarian ethics and photojournalism ethics do not meet the standards of privacy and dignity in such a way as they are applied in medical ethics when images of suffering bodies are displayed to the public.

This study is yet another attempt to shed light on this diversity of ethics in the work of professional photographers, while at the same time, the demanding task is to try to shed light on the complexity and blurriness of the professional fields in the current media environment. Instead of strictly comparing the fields, I aim to discuss the ethical groundings of journalism and NGO communication and approach them in relation to the interview findings. The focus of the study is on the photographers’ career paths, professional ethics, and NGO–media relations. From these grounds, I seek to answer the following questions:

In addition to the reduction of photography departments worldwide (Ferrucci et al., 2020; Hadland et al., 2015; Mortensen, 2014), work opportunities for professional photojournalists have diminished also in consequence of the spread of mobile phone cameras and fast Internet connections, which have enabled citizens all over the world to shoot photographs and videos and get them published in journalistic and social media. Furthermore, text-based journalists have entered the field of photographers, since they are expected to multitask and take their own pictures. As an effect of digitalisation, the financial value of images has also plummeted to a fraction of what it once was (Gürsel, 2016).

Consequently, most news photographers of today are self-employed (Hadland et al., 2015). Thomson (2018) has dated the shift from a staff-based to a free-lance model to the early 2000s. For many photographers, the shift has meant increasing job insecurity, financing their own equipment, and paying for their own insurance, among other things. In addition, many media outlets have offered freelance photographers agreements to sell all the rights to their images without proper compensation (Thomson, 2018). This happened in Finland in 2009, when the country's biggest news media company, Sanoma News, decided to weaken its contributors’ rights to their own production (Yle News, 2009), and it was followed by a similar contract by Sanoma Magazines in 2012 (Atarah, 2012).

Consequently, there has been discussion about the de-professionalisation of photojournalism, meaning that photojournalists have struggled to defend their profession as important and different from amateur practice (Ferrucci et al., 2020; Gynnild et al., 2017; Mortensen, 2014; Yaschur, 2012). Photography teacher and theorist Fred Ritchin has even argued that in the current state, photojournalism is a “hybrid enterprise of amateurs and professionals along with surveillance cameras, Google Street Views and other sources”, and what are needed, rather than more photographers, are curators to filter and make sense of the abundance of images (as cited in Shore, 2014: 11).

Despite these shifts in the media environment, the change has also opened new doors for photographers. According to Gürsel (2016: 282), “it is not photography but rather the press that is in crisis”. Many professionals have expanded their scope from still images to videos and from journalism to other fields to make a living from photography (e.g., Thomson, 2018). These fields include, for example, commercial photography, public relations, corporate communications, artistic projects, and NGO work, which is scrutinised in this study. As the income for freelance photographers comes from various assignments from different fields, it requires photographers to redefine their professional values and reorientate them when they change employers.

This section discusses the professional ethics and guiding values of photojournalism and humanitarian photography. These two fields are not always strictly distinct, and their boundaries may not seem clearly defined as the professionals travel between journalism and NGOs and similar work is done in both fields. Despite this blurriness, photojournalism and humanitarian photography are practised with somewhat different guiding values and ethical foundations. My intention here is to highlight some of the most common similarities and differences in this respect. The professional values presented here are on a general and ideological level, and they do not rule out the possibility that individual professionals or organisations may adhere to different values.

It can be argued that today's journalists and humanitarian NGOs are both following high ethical standards. Western journalism organisations have a long tradition of self-regulation, with a central value of providing information that is accurate, fair, and thorough. The main emphasis is on informing the public, which is crucial to the functioning of democracy. At the same time, it is important for journalists to minimise harm and to respect human dignity in their reporting (e.g., Society of professional journalists, 2014). In a similar vein, NGOs formulated a code of conduct on images and messages for the first time in 1989 (NGDO-EU Liaison Committee, 1989), with an updated version in 2006 (Concord, 2012). In 2014, the Irish Development NGO platform Dóchas published an illustrated version of the ethical code (Dóchas, 2021). The NGO guidelines emphasise humanitarian values of solidarity, dignity, human rights protection, and truthful representation when reporting from the Global South. In practice, the code recommends, for example, that photographers ensure they have a full informed consent of the subject before taking a photograph or interviewing people.

Despite the fact that journalists and NGOs alike value truthfulness in their reporting, both have struggled with questions of fair and trustworthy representation of reality throughout history. As for photography, the ethical codes of journalists and NGOs are largely intertwined with these issues.

According to Fehrenbach and Rodogno (2015a), humanitarian photographs have always been highly selective, since the aid organisations decide which catastrophes or social problems will be intervened in and taken up as humanitarian issues. Once a cause is raised, then images of suffering are expected for achieving the desired outcome. Thus, humanitarian photographs have for many decades raised concerns about racial stereotypes, power relations, and the human dignity of the represented victims, in addition to the burden of using colonial metaphors and creating humanitarian identities for subjects (Chouliaraki, 2013; Fehrenbach & Rodogno, 2015a).

Therefore, in their ethical codes, humanitarian NGOs call for visual representations that reflect reality, in the sense that the images are accompanied by a proper contextualisation and that the images do not unnecessarily depict vulnerable people in idyllic, exotic, or helpless victim positions. Since the late 1980s, such images were increasingly considered unethical and ineffective in both NGO communication and the news media, and this opened a path for replacing images of suffering bodies with more positive and empowering images (Kotilainen, 2016). This, in turn, has been criticised as a simplistic solution that does not solve the structural causes of humanitarian crisis but may rather uphold the unequal positions between the Global North and the Global South (Chouliaraki, 2010).

The concerns of truthful representation in photojournalism, in turn, have chiefly focused on fostering the idea of unmanipulated photographs in both daily work and in the ethical codes of the practice (e.g., World Press Photo, 2022; Associated Press, 2023). Consequently, such questions have also gained wide scholarly interest since the digitalisation of the late 1980s (e.g., Carlson, 2009; Lehmuskallio et al., 2019; Lowrey, 2003; Mäenpää & Seppänen, 2010; Reaves, 1992).

In addition, journalists value the idea of documenting the right moment and avoiding staging and manoeuvring of the situations (Wheeler, 2002), while critical research has considered these as objectivity rituals for constructing credible images in journalism (Schwartz, 1992). This ideal has led to a common journalistic practice where pictures are often taken first, and permission to use them is asked from the subject afterwards.

Less attention, however, has been paid to the ethical questions of photojournalism from the viewpoint of the photographic subjects. Miller and Dahmen's (2020) study is one of the rare examples in this respect. It shows that of the different occupational groups of the newsroom, especially photographers who work intimately with their photographic subjects have been found to apply an ethics of care, a will to empower, and a genuine interest in questions of how capturing and publishing images would affect their subjects.

Generally, balancing between the fundamental values of information provision and respecting human dignity is a dilemma in journalism, and it is constantly considered in daily practice (Morse, 2014). This balancing is routine-like in the photojournalistic work, while the practical constraints and business logic also largely influence the ethical decisions of photojournalism professionals (Mäenpää, 2022).

In addition to ethics, Powers (2016) studied other ideological values that guide the work of journalists and NGOs and found that journalists and NGOs share values that overlap but also differ. For example, fact-based reporting, accuracy, and balance are shared values, whereas NGO advocacy is a value that departs from journalism norms (Powers, 2016). Getting the facts right and investigating what is going on in the world is undoubtedly important for journalists and NGO communication alike. Despite this, however, there are differences, for example, in sourcing and investigation strategies. Powers (2016) found that humanitarian NGOs tend to trust mostly the evidence they gather “on the ground” by interviewing the affected people, whereas official sources are treated as secondary to that. Journalism, instead, tends to utilise and trust mainly experts and official sources in their reporting (Berkowitz, 2020), and such authorities are usually ranked above civil society (Lang, 2013).

Furthermore, timeliness is valued by both journalists and NGO professionals, but for different reasons. For NGOs, timeliness is connected to advocacy, since the aim is to utilise the current information to act fast and provide help where it is needed (Powers, 2016). However, for the NGOs, building long-term trust with the communities they work in is more important than publishing material as fast as possible, and therefore, for example, the consent process is always done carefully even though it might delay getting interviews or photographs (Dencik & Allan, 2017). As for journalists, the concept of time is central to the very idea of news. News is something that has happened recently and is currently in the interest of the audiences and, thus, must be published immediately (Roscho, 1975/1999). The logic of speed is also an integral part of making a revenue in commercial journalism. Timeliness is particularly central in photojournalism that is dependent on the available technology and that has always taken advantage of the newest innovations to increase speed.

The purpose of this research was to study the career paths, professional values, and motivations of professional photographers and other visual communicators who work or have worked for both journalism and humanitarian NGOs. In addition, the aim was to shed light on what kind of approach the humanitarian NGOs have taken towards journalistic media and how the professionals balance between these two fields. For this purpose, I conducted semistructured interviews with twelve Finnish visual professionals, most of whom have a background in journalism. Nine were photographers and three were visual communication specialists who all work or have worked for the Finnish Red Cross, the International Red Cross/Red Crescent Movement, or the Finn Church Aid (FCA).

Most of the interviewed photographers had worked for the Finland-based Field Communications Unit (FCU), which is part of the International Aid and Disaster Response Unit of the Finnish Red Cross. These photographers represent about one-tenth of a pool of professional photographers that the Finnish Red Cross has in their delegate reserve. All the interviewed photographers could be considered established professionals, and some of them are also award-winning photographers in Finland.

The FCU was established in 2012 by a few Finnish visual professionals, and it is a rapidly deployable team of one to three communications and audiovisual experts with extensive media contacts. They aim to work within emergencies and disasters as well as producing longer-term documentary projects, mainly for the Red Crescent national societies around the world, while also offering free materials for the news media to use. At the time of conducting this research, according to the interviewees, the FCU was well recognised among the international partner Red Cross organisations. In addition, the Finnish Red Cross has communications, marketing, and fundraising teams that also plan and produce visuals. Sometimes the interviewed photographers also fulfilled the needs of these teams.

The Finn Church Aid is Finland's largest international aid organisation. Unlike the Red Cross, however, FCA does not have an international umbrella organisation that would mutually share communication material. FCA mainly assigns photographers as freelancers, and their material is published in the NGOs’ own channels and offered free of charge to the media.

Out of the twelve interviewees, there were eight women and four men. The predefined interview themes included individual career paths, the photographers’ practical work under NGO contracts, ethics, and the relationships between NGOs and media organisations. The main questions that drove this research were related to the photographers’ professional values and the differences and similarities between photojournalism and humanitarian photography.

The interviews, lasting an average of 60 minutes, were conducted May–November 2020 and were carried out via remote connections such as Zoom, Teams, or Skype due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Conducted in Finnish, the interviews were recorded, transcribed, and coded with Atlas.ti software, and the chosen interview quotes were translated into English for the purposes of this article. To maintain anonymity, the interviewees were consecutively numbered in the order the interviews were conducted.

The dataset was coded into 21 initial thematic codes, which were created inductively by reading and revisiting the data and searching for patterns and repeating themes. The initial codes included titles such as work history, photographer training, photographic style, truthfulness and objectivity, assignments and briefing, and professional values, for example.

The interview data was analysed using thematic analysis (Nowell et al., 2017) to organise the data into thematic clusters that were then discussed in dialogue with earlier research. The final themes were created from the basis of the research questions by combining two or more initial codes into one theme. The themes introduced in this article are 1) photographers’ motivations for NGO work, 2) professional values between photojournalism and NGO photography, and 3) NGO–media relations from the photographers’ viewpoint.

In this study, I explored the work of professional photographers and other visual communicators who have worked for both humanitarian NGOs and the news media. The research focused on their motivation for NGO work (RQ1), professional values (RQ2), and NGO–media relations (RQ3). A particular interest was in the professional values and ethical foundations that guide the work of these two fields from the visual professionals’ viewpoint.

For example, one of the dividing lines is how much emphasis is put on information provision and on human dignity and how the different valuations effect reporting about human suffering (e.g., Society of professional journalists, 2014; Concord, 2012).

As for the first research question about motivation factors, it seems that for most of the photographers, NGO work is a temporary option to accrue merit vitae and to gain new work experience from abroad. In addition, the choice of humanitarian photography from other possible photographic assignments was reasoned by the importance of the work along with the fact that the invitations to work for the studied organisations had passed as recommendations from colleague to colleague. Furthermore, the diminishing work opportunities at news media were mentioned as pushing factors that force photographers to seek new possibilities for making a living.

As for the professional values, some distinctions between NGO photography and photojournalism are evident from the data. The main difference is that when the interviewees work as photojournalists, they put more emphasis on information provision, while as NGO photographers they prioritise empowering the photographic subjects and respecting human dignity.

The different emphasis on the axis of providing information and help led to the conclusion that while on NGO assignments, it was easy for the photographers to report and document what was happening and meet the deadlines, since that is what they are used to as photojournalists. On the other hand, such NGO assignments that fell outside the photojournalistic realm were, instead, more challenging for them ethically. For example, producing emotion-provoking images by stretching the limits of documentary tradition was considered unethical by most of the interviewees, even though they understood that, for example, campaigning images are not documents in the journalistic sense but rather marketing and fundraising images. One part of the problem is that, in practice, there is no clear distinction between the different mobilisations of humanitarian photography (Fehrenbach & Rodogno, 2015b).

Furthermore, the interviewed photographers had adopted deeply to the humanitarian values. As photography itself could be considered to some extent as exploitation of the photographic subjects (Sontag, 1973/2005), it could be argued that there is always a fundamental tension between photography and the aim of improving the world by communicating the situations of vulnerable people through photography to the wider public (see also Nissinen, 2015). The humanitarian values of respect and dignity towards the photographic subjects help photographers deal with this tension and justify the work they do.

The study also showed that sometimes publishing certain images would endanger the work of the NGO at the location, which would be a reason to restrict information provision in NGO communication. On such occasions, the interviewees felt conflicted because of their background as photojournalists, but also because they felt a responsibility to tell the stories of their photographic subjects. This exemplifies that journalistic and humanitarian values are not consistent sets of ideals but rather often contradictory, while sometimes the values from different ethical groundings may yet serve similar goals.

From the viewpoint of NGO–media relations, this research shows that the studied NGOs had gained media publicity with the help of the professional photographers they had hired. These photographers with a photojournalism background know the media logic, while they also have personal contacts with key people at media organisations, which can help increase trust and mediate relations between NGOs and the news media. On the other hand, the interviewed professionals did not have unreasonable expectations about their possibilities to shape the news agenda. They recognised the difficulties NGOs have in gaining media publicity for remote countries and silent or long-lasting crises that have weak links to the lives of the people in the Global North (see Powers, 2018; Thrall et al., 2014; Waisbord, 2011).

To conclude, this study has shed light on the work of professional photographers who actively seek new work opportunities outside the journalistic field. As media work is increasingly practised outside the journalistic institution, it is important to understand the ethical values and starting points from where the different professionals approach the work. Further research is needed to draw a bigger picture of the professional photographers’ employment situation and professional ethics, while national case studies are also important in shedding light on the changing media work from different angles.