ARTICLE
Wronging Persons Through Photographs: On Photographic Front Incursions
Volume 30, Number 4, July 2025, Pages 572–599
PDFAbstract
Many photographs take persons as their primary subjects, and people often feel wronged by the creation, handling, or dissemination of their photographic image. Yet many dismiss these claims of purported wrongdoing or are quite conservative in their estimations of when photographs can wrong their subjects. In this article, I offer an account of a fundamental photographic wrong that I call nonconsensual photographic front incursion. I argue that this wrong is grounded in the status of persons as self-presenters and in the status of photographs as natural symbols and souvenirs. Photographic front incursions are one type of photographic wrong; they are important both because of their ubiquity and because they are difficult to capture within existing normative frameworks. Acknowledging the existence of photographic front incursions is, according to my argument, to acknowledge the importance of two things that analytic philosophers have tended to downplay: the relevance of persons’ bodies and personas to their moral agency and the status of photographs as natural symbols.
Copyright © 2025 Macalester Bell
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.
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