Photography has long been celebrated as a means of access. Access to places, to lives, to realities otherwise unseen.
Yet embedded within this promise lies a persistent tension: the risk that seeing becomes taking. Photography does not only show the other; it can appropriate the other visually, converting presence into image, experience into representation, and difference into material.
Visual appropriation in photography is not always intentional, nor is it always violent in obvious ways. It often operates quietly, through framing, circulation, and authorship. The moment an image is made, something changes. The person photographed enters a system of meaning they do not fully control. Their image can travel, be interpreted, archived, monetized, or aestheticized far beyond its original context.
Historically, photography developed alongside expansionist and colonial projects. Cameras accompanied explorers, anthropologists, missionaries, and administrators. The act of photographing the “other” was frequently aligned with cataloguing, classifying, and fixing identities. Difference became something to be collected. The photograph functioned as proof of presence and as confirmation of hierarchy.
These images were rarely neutral. They positioned the photographer as observer and the subject as object. Cultural complexity was flattened into visual shorthand. Clothing, gestures, and bodies became signs that confirmed preconceived ideas. Photography did not simply document difference; it produced it.
Contemporary photography inherits this structure, even when working under radically different intentions. The language of humanism, documentary concern, or artistic exploration does not automatically dissolve the problem of appropriation. The imbalance remains whenever one party controls representation and the other becomes represented.
Visual appropriation occurs when the photograph extracts meaning without reciprocity. When the image benefits the photographer more than the subject. When aesthetic value overrides lived reality. This does not require exploitation in the legal sense. It can exist within ethical grey zones, sustained by good intentions and institutional validation.
One of the most common justifications for photographing the other is visibility. To show is framed as an act of recognition. Yet visibility alone does not guarantee agency. Being seen is not the same as being understood, and understanding is not the same as being represented on one’s own terms. Visibility can expose without empowering.
The problem intensifies when images circulate outside their original context. A photograph made in intimacy can become anonymous. A gesture meant for one relationship can be read by thousands of strangers. The subject’s image becomes detached from their voice. Interpretation replaces dialogue.
Markets and institutions play a decisive role in this process. Galleries, festivals, media outlets, and archives determine which representations of the other are valued, rewarded, and preserved. Certain narratives become legible, others invisible. Photography that confirms dominant expectations travels more easily than photography that resists them.
This creates a paradox. Images of the other are often praised for their authenticity precisely when they conform to familiar visual codes. Exoticism, hardship, resilience, spirituality, marginality. These themes circulate because they are recognizable. The other becomes legible by being reduced. Appropriation is not limited to cross-cultural contexts. It also operates along lines of class, gender, age, and power. Photographing poverty, vulnerability, or intimacy always raises the question of benefit. Who gains from this image? Who speaks through it? Who is exposed?
The photographer’s position matters profoundly. Distance, mobility, and access shape the gaze. A photographer who can leave always looks differently than one who cannot. Temporality matters as well. Short-term encounters often produce images that emphasize surface over depth, appearance over relation.Long-term engagement does not automatically resolve appropriation, but it changes its terms. Time allows negotiation, trust, and revision. It introduces the possibility of being questioned by the subject, of being accountable. Appropriation thrives on speed; relationship slows it down.
Authorship is another critical axis. Who signs the image? Who tells the story? Collaborative practices attempt to redistribute agency, but they operate within systems that still privilege singular authorship. Even shared projects are often absorbed by institutions that require clear ownership.
None of this suggests that photographing the other should be avoided. It suggests that it must be approached with awareness. The ethical challenge is not to eliminate difference from photography, but to recognize that difference is never neutral material.
Photography becomes problematic when it assumes the right to take without consequence. When it treats the other as raw visual content rather than as a participant in meaning. When it replaces encounter with capture.
To photograph without appropriating requires attention to limits. Limits of access, of understanding, of interpretation. It requires accepting that not everything is available to be shown, and not every image deserves to circulate.This does not lead to purity or innocence. Photography cannot escape power relations. But it can make them visible. It can resist easy narratives. It can acknowledge its own partiality.
Photography as visual appropriation of the other is not a condition that can be solved once and for all. It is a tension that must be held. The ethical weight of an image lies not in its intention alone, but in how it positions bodies, voices, and meanings within a larger system. The question is not whether photography takes something from the other. It always does. The question is whether it gives anything back, or whether it remains a one-sided act disguised as representation.
