Published Essay: Staging Suffering: Photographic Ethics in the Representation of Pain, Poverty & Pathos

Abstract

This critical review explores the ethical, aesthetic, and rhetorical dimensions of photographic representation in the context of poverty, psychological suffering, and autobiographical storytelling. It argues that the stakes of photographic practice lie in its power to shape empathy, agency, and public discourse. Using the author's own series Precious Poverty as a case study, the essay interrogates how pain, pathos-as-provocation, and constructed imagery challenge conventions of documentary truth and genre. Engaging with theorists including Susan Sontag, David Levi Strauss, and Jo Spence, and analyzing contemporary case studies, the paper considers how aesthetics and ethics intersect in socially engaged lens-based practice. The author advocates for intentional hybridity in photographic storytelling, framing magical realism—a mode that merges the everyday with subtle surrealism to express emotional and psychological truths—and performativity as credible strategies of visual narrative inquiry when depicting conditions of hardship and struggle.

Author’s Note

This critical reflection draws on research and creative work initiated during my Postgraduate studies in Photography at Falmouth University. Precious Poverty was originally developed as part of the practice-based research module Informing Contexts, where questions of photographic ethics, autobiographical narrative, and constructed imagery were critically explored. Due to financial hardship and housing instability, I was unable to complete the full MA programme, but was awarded a Postgraduate Certificate. The work has continued to evolve independently since.

Introduction

This essay forms part of my postgraduate work at Falmouth University. During its development, I encountered pointed resistance from a tutor regarding my use of tableau to represent eviction and subsequent homelessness. When asked—“Where are the eviction papers? Where is this ‘visual evidence’?”—I was confronted with the documentary imperative to show trauma literally. That moment became a catalyst for rethinking how pain and suffering are represented—both ethically and aesthetically. 

Not all artistic responses to trauma are direct. Similarly, not all musical responses to war are Dylan-esque folk ballads. Some, like Gustav Holst’s The Planets (1918) or Steve Reich’s Different Trains (1988), rely on abstraction and juxtaposition to evoke complex emotional and historical realities. Reich’s work overlays audio recordings of Holocaust survivors with childhood memories of American train journeys, transforming minimalist musical structures into an emotionally resonant soundscape—a rhythmically layered bridge between personal and collective memory—one built from repetition and resonance, not a folk song. In the same way, my work was never intended to document eviction directly, but to explore how such experiences resist literal depiction and call for a more affective, symbolic approach.

Photography, one might argue, differs from music in that it is often perceived as instantaneous and indexical. But this distinction collapses when we consider the constructed nature of images and their reliance on cultural coding. As Roland Barthes and later semioticians have argued, photographs do not speak for themselves—they depend on intertextual, symbolic, and emotional cues to be interpreted. Like music, photographic meaning can be composed rhythmically—through gesture, staging, repetition, and omission. If music can encode trauma via metaphor and structure, then photography, too, can suggest presence without evidencing it. My work seeks that same register: affective resonance over empirical record.

This analogy resonates deeply with my own experience of eviction and its aftermath, which included severe stress-induced alopecia. Although I created a short video documenting my hair loss (Mitchell, 2020), I chose not to include it in my photographic series. It felt too soon—too raw—to integrate that material into a medium I was still emotionally negotiating. As with psychotherapy, the disclosure of trauma must be gradual. It cannot be presented wholesale or purged instantly; it must be metabolised. This understanding shaped my preference for symbolic realism and metaphorical composition. Rather than offering trauma as visual evidence, I sought to express how pain resonates neurologically and emotionally over time. This approach rejects documentary literalism in favour of a visual language that honours nuance, introspection, and a different transformational lineage of expression—one where the image evolves as the artist evolves.

This essay is grounded in practice-based research and combines auto-ethnographic reflection, visual production, and critical theory. Drawing on my own lived experience of eviction and psychological distress, I use photography as both a representational and investigative tool. The work develops through a process of iterative image-making—primarily staged self-portraiture—supported by semiotic analysis and informed by socially engaged photographic traditions. This approach enables a hybrid critical method, one that integrates affective insight with conceptual framing and positions the artist not only as image-maker but as situated subject.

This review emerges from my photographic series Precious Poverty, in which I employed staged self-portraiture and included my dog as both a symbolic and emotional collaborator. The work addresses the complex ethical and practical challenges inherent in visually representing homelessness, poverty, and psychological suffering. My personal encounter with eviction amid the Covid-19 crisis heightened my sensitivity to the responsibilities and potential pitfalls of photographic representation, prompting a deeper exploration of these themes. Susan Sontag’s assertion that "an image is drained of its force by the way it is used, where and how often it is seen" (Sontag, 2003, p. 105) serves as a foundational consideration throughout this analysis.

This essay critically evaluates photographic practices through three key lenses—pain, poverty, and pathos—exploring ethical, theoretical, and practical dimensions through both personal experience and established photographic traditions. As this reflection unfolds, it becomes clear that aesthetic strategies, genre expectations, and the ethics of representation are not only central concerns for artists and curators but vital to shaping public consciousness around suffering and marginalisation.

Pain: Recognizing and Representing Suffering

Pain, as a subject in photography, is fraught with ethical and aesthetic complexity. Its representation is never neutral; it is always mediated by a web of visual codes, cultural assumptions, and contextual cues. The depiction of suffering can provoke empathy, revulsion, or voyeuristic detachment, depending on how it is framed and the viewer’s own socio-cultural background. Central to this dynamic is the reliance on culturally encoded visual signs—indexical (direct traces of the real), symbolic (conventionally agreed meanings), and intertextual (references to other images and discourses). These signs operate as a kind of visual grammar that guides interpretation, often unconsciously.

Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of “cultural utterances” (Bakhtin, 1984) provides a useful lens through which to understand this process. According to Bakhtin, every act of expression is dialogic—it carries echoes of past expressions and anticipates responses. In the realm of photography, an image of pain becomes a cultural utterance not only through what it shows, but in how it recalls prior representations of suffering, trauma, or martyrdom. Whether consciously or not, photographers draw on a shared visual lexicon, and viewers decode meaning through the same lens, shaped by history, media, religion, and politics.

This dialogic framework underscores how photographs of pain do not simply document reality but enter into ongoing cultural conversations. For instance, war photography often borrows visual tropes from religious iconography, evoking crucifixion imagery or pietà-like compositions to suggest sacrifice and pathos. These intertextual—dialogic in origin and structure—resonances amplify emotional impact, but they also risk aestheticizing suffering or reducing complex realities to consumable symbols. Thus, ethical representation of pain in photography demands not only technical skill but cultural literacy: an awareness of the visual utterances being invoked, and the potential consequences of their repetition.

Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) interrogates this phenomenon by examining how repeated exposure to violent imagery affects public consciousness. She challenges the ethical assumptions of war photography, particularly the belief that shocking images inherently provoke moral action. Sontag cites Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas (1938) and Ernst Friedrich’s Krieg dem Kriege! (1924), both of which suggest that witnessing brutality through images can catalyse political reform. But Sontag resists this optimism, arguing that in the age of mass media, repetition often dulls rather than intensifies affect. As she observes, “Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers” (Sontag, 2003, p. 101).

Crucially, Sontag also draws attention to the aesthetic dimension of such images. The formal beauty of a photograph, she argues, can distance viewers from the suffering it depicts, creating a space in which pain becomes stylised, even consumed as spectacle. This aestheticisation complicates the ethical stakes: a powerful image may provoke reflection, but it may also seduce, neutralise, or desensitise. In this sense, her argument converges with the dialogic framework outlined above—photographs of suffering are not just seen, they are interpreted through a thick web of prior visual utterances. The more familiar the image, the more it risks becoming inert, its power drained by repetition and overexposure.

My own experience with pain is not battlefield trauma, its psychological distress and socioeconomic displacement resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic. As both subject and photographer, I positioned myself in front of the lens and included my dog in the compositions—an effort to complicate the image of the suffering individual and challenge assumptions of documentary detachment. While the displacement I experienced was technically transitory—the effects of eviction and subsequent homelessness spanned approximately four years, much of which I spent living in rural Spain—the conditions that shaped my inability to recover were deeply tied to class-based precarity. The absence of financial safety nets, either personal or familial, made recovery not only emotionally difficult but materially impossible. In this respect, poverty did not emerge as a “one-off” but persisted as a chronic condition—embedded in my working-class background and exacerbated by a lack of resources that might have allowed me to “move on.” The image of myself and my dog wrapped in bandages in Precious Poverty is intentionally absurdist—engaging with familiar visual tropes of pain while resisting graphic realism.

When the Covid-19 pandemic began, I was living and working in rural Spain. Within weeks, I lost all income as freelance opportunities disappeared and the government support systems became overwhelmed. For nearly a year, I had no stable financial resources. I was evicted from my home and developed severe stress-induced alopecia, losing approximately two-thirds of the hair on my head and body. The impact of this period was both economic and psychological, and its effects lasted for years.

Although I documented some of this experience in a short video at the time, I made a conscious decision not to include direct images of my alopecia in the Precious Poverty series. While visible, the hair loss felt too raw to represent visually within a medium I was still negotiating. More importantly, I was wary of offering trauma as evidence. The absence of literal documentation is deliberate: the work does not seek to prove hardship, but to explore how it feels, how it lingers, and how it resists neat representation—particularly within visual cultures that so often mediate poverty through reductive or sensationalist frames.

The image, titled Postcard Home #264: Everything’s Going Well, mimics the visual syntax of a sunlit tourist postcard. The figures—myself and my dog—face the camera in what might initially appear to be a composed and conventional portrait. Yet the bandages suggest damage and absurd concealment, while the caption works against the visual calm. The phrase “everything’s going well” is not reassurance - it’s a bitterly comic denial that foregrounds the tension between what is seen and what is felt. 

This choice aligns with Freud’s understanding of psychic pain, which he connects to the mechanism of anxiety (Freud, 1926). It also resonates with John Berger’s assertion that “Photographs of agony bring us up short” (Berger, 1972, p. 42). But whereas traditional documentary seeks to shock, my goal is to pause the viewer—to replace reflexive pity with reflective engagement. By using humour as an aesthetic tool, I aim to create a more accessible and critical route into the experience of psychical pain. 

This performative approach continued throughout the series, where props such as crutches, exaggerated facial expressions and levitation signified distress not through realism but theatricality. These were not candid moments but constructed metaphors—visual idioms for 

psychic trauma. By avoiding literal depictions of suffering, I was able to approach emotional truth obliquely, echoing what Sontag refers to as the “moral opacity” of pain (2003, p. 126). Many of the more surreal compositions—such as an image in which I sit cross-legged in the street, gazing into an open trapdoor—lean deliberately into the aesthetics of magical realism. In Search of Moral Opacity—and Food is one image, crafted through digital compositing and Photoshop interventions, that introduces symbolic disruptions into an otherwise mundane environment. It destabilizes the familiar, using constructed space to reflect psychological stress and disorientation. The work does not aim to provoke sympathy; instead, it approaches pain as a form of communication—one that invites viewers to consider their own experiences through the frame of visual disturbance. 

Jo Spence

Jo Spence’s legacy is not only personal but profoundly political. Her concept of “photo-therapy”—using the camera as a tool of self-exploration and resistance—disrupts the conventional photographer–subject power dynamic. In my work, I aim to mirror this methodology by turning the camera on myself—avoiding victimhood, and exploring how narrative and aesthetic control can be reclaimed. Where Spence deconstructed the medical gaze and its patriarchal authority, I aim to dismantle the economic gaze that flattens the poor into objects of pity. Our methods differ, but the impulse is shared: photography not as documentation alone, but as therapeutic-political intervention.

Spence also emphasized education and critical visual literacy, a dimension I incorporate into my own gallery installations through captions, contextual text, and, at times, film. In doing so, I aim to foster not only empathy but informed spectatorship—viewers who are not merely moved but made more critically aware of their own gaze.

Spence’s work, while grounded in the documentary tradition, also anticipates the logic of magical realism through her deliberate blending of fantasy and critique. Magical realism, as adapted into visual culture, refers to the merging of everyday reality with surreal, uncanny, or fantastical elements in ways that resist binary distinctions between fiction and truth. Rather than offering escape or illusion, this strategy draws attention to the emotional and psychological intensities embedded in lived experience—often amplifying what might be overlooked by realist representation. Her cancer narratives, for instance, employed theatrical props and absurdist visual cues to destabilise the medical gaze and reinsert subjectivity. Similarly, Precious Poverty adopts performativity as a means of reclaiming authorship—not by retreating into fiction, but by bending realism until it fractures and reveals deeper emotional truths. This shared commitment to visual intervention—where the surreal is used to reveal, rather than escape, reality—binds my work to Spence’s legacy and underscores the potential of magical realism as a radical documentary strategy.

Poverty: Ethics and Genre in Photographic Representation

Photographic representations of poverty have long occupied a contested space between advocacy and exploitation. Let’s look at the documentary tradition, especially in the work of Dorothea Lange and Lewis Hine, which was grounded in the belief that visual evidence of social injustice could inspire reform. Lange’s Migrant Mother (1936) remains a cultural touchstone—but also a case study in ethical ambiguity. The image is powerful, but its circulation came at a personal cost to its subject, Florence Owens Thompson, who later expressed discomfort at being made a public symbol of hardship.

This dilemma persists in contemporary practice. In 2005, Tim Adams critiqued Tom Hunter’s Living in Hell and Other Stories, suggesting it lacked the emotional authenticity of Richard Billingham’s Ray’s a Laugh (1996). The distinction? Hunter staged his images in tableau, drawing inspiration from classical painting, while Billingham presented raw, intimate snapshots of his alcoholic father and chaotic family life. But the assumption that documentary is inherently more truthful than tableau fails to account for the constructed nature of all photography.

David Bate (2009) directly challenges this fallacy, emphasising that every photograph is shaped by a matrix of decisions—lens choice, framing, lighting, timing, context—that mediate what is seen. He reminds us that photographic meaning is constructed, not inherent, and that the ‘truth-effect’ of a documentary image relies on genre conventions rather than authenticity. This position offers theoretical support for my own aesthetic strategy: the deliberate staging of scenes in Precious Poverty is not a distortion of reality, but a critical intervention within it.

Semiotic theory further underpins this approach. Charles Sanders Peirce’s typology of signs (icon, index, symbol) and Ferdinand de Saussure’s structural linguistics both argue that meaning is relational and culturally encoded. A gritty snapshot may feel “real,” but that perception is a product of learned visual codes—not evidence of truth.

Critiques of tableau as inauthentic often overlook how stylised photography can destabilise viewer assumptions. In my work, I embrace staging the image as revelation. By constructing scenes that merge realism with absurdity, I invite viewers to consider how poverty is aestheticised, how suffering becomes commodified, and how images shape and manipulate perception.

Here, the insights of John Tagg and Ariella Azoulay are especially relevant. Tagg (1988) exposes how documentary photography historically served institutional power, functioning as a tool of surveillance and classification within state and social systems. This historical weight lingers in contemporary expectations that photography must bear witness through transparency. Azoulay (2008), however, reframes the act of viewing as a civil contract—an ethical relationship in which the viewer, photographer, and subject are all implicated. Her model demands that viewers approach images as ethical participants in the event of photography. This relational understanding informs my rejection of passive, evidentiary realism and supports a performative, co-constructed model of representation.

My staged images are not simulations—they are interventions. They reflect a desire to make visible not just material poverty, but the affective, psychic, and symbolic dimensions of economic suffering. This strategy resists both the manipulative aesthetics of the charity appeal and the art-world fetishisation of “gritty” realism.

Pathos: Aestheticization and Ethical Tensions

Pathos—Aristotle’s third rhetorical mode, alongside ethos and logos—has long occupied a contested space within aesthetics. On one hand, emotional appeal can be persuasive, immersive, and politically potent. On the other, it risks tipping into sentimentality or manipulation. This tension is particularly magnified in photography, where still images of suffering can produce either empathy or emotional fatigue.

The work of Sebastião Salgado exemplifies this debate. Known for his lush, black-and-white prints of suffering communities (Workers, Genesis, Migrations), Salgado has been both praised for raising awareness and criticised for aestheticising hardship. Ingrid Sischy’s influential essay “Good Intentions” (1991) argued that Salgado’s stylised depictions dilute the immediacy and urgency of the tragedies they portray.

David Levi Strauss, in Between the Eyes (2003), offers a direct rebuttal. He challenges the idea that beauty inherently undermines political urgency, asking: “Why can’t beauty be a call to action?” For Strauss, all representation is transformative. Stylisation, far from being apolitical, can in fact deepen engagement rather than deflate it.

Susan Sontag, often interpreted as sceptical of beauty in the context of suffering, presents a more complex view. She recognises that aesthetic form can both amplify and anaesthetise pain. Her analysis of the photograph of an emaciated child during the Biafran famine reveals a central contradiction: the composition invites visual awe, even as it documents horror. This duality—where beauty and brutality are entwined—is what renders such images ethically unstable. 

These insights suggest the need for a more nuanced framework—one that does not dismiss affective aesthetics, but instead interrogates how they operate, what they provoke, and where they lead. In this light, pathos is not a moral hazard, but a rhetorical strategy. The work of Salgado and others may walk the line between spectacle and critique, but their lasting power lies not in offering resolution, but in compelling us to confront complexity.

 My staged self-portrait Pathos aims to do the same—inviting viewers to re-examine poverty not as a static condition, but as a constructed, read, and often misread visual event. The image adopts a sympathetic pose not to dramatise hardship but to question how certain facial expressions and body language are coded within visual culture. What does a ‘poverty face’ look like? Who gets to perform vulnerability credibly? In Pathos, the stylised melancholy of my expression both mimics and critiques the familiar iconography of suffering—drawing attention to how empathy is visually triggered, and how easily pathos can slide into performance. Rather than presenting a literal or “documentary truth”, the image uses theatricality to destabilise our expectations of what sincerity looks like—and to ask how much of that expectation is aesthetic conditioning.

Constructed Hardship: The Unrealistic Determination in Fiction  

One of the central images in Precious Poverty, titled The Unrealistic Determination in Fiction, shows me dragging a small rural structure across a barren landscape. The house is a digitally inserted choza de pastor—a traditional shepherd’s hut I photographed in rural Spain, where I was living when the Covid-19 pandemic struck. The final image is a Photoshop composite made from four separate locations: the hut, myself, and my dog were photographed together; the sky, foreground, and background were drawn from three other locations. These disparate elements were assembled into a single, cohesive frame—deliberately invoking the visual logic of 19th-century Romantic painting, in which artists often composited idealised scenes from multiple sketches and sources to produce emotionally resonant, unified vistas.

The image draws from three key visual traditions. First, the Romantic landscape tradition—particularly in the work of painters like Caspar David Friedrich—where dramatic vistas were used to symbolise emotional or spiritual interiority. Like Friedrich’s lone figures confronting, vast, unknowable nature, the figure in my image appears isolated and burdened, confronting an overwhelming emotional and existential terrain. Yet where Friedrich’s figures often point to the sublime or spiritual transcendence, The Unrealistic Determination in Fiction points to material hardship grounded in class and economic instability.

Second, the genre of Western cinema, where protagonists—typically male—endure hardship through solitary struggle. The iconography of dragging one’s history or home across a hostile landscape is deeply coded in these visual traditions, positioning the subject as both heroic and stoic. Third, the image references surrealist cinema—specifically Un Chien Andalou (1929)—in which a priest drags a piano laden with symbolic baggage. In my work, the act of dragging the house becomes both absurd and overdetermined: a gesture that engages with, and critiques, the weight of cultural, economic, and psychological expectation.

What appears at first as a staged moment of hardship is deliberately unsettled by the title. The Unrealistic Determination in Fiction acts as a semiotic punctuation point—challenging emotional identification and drawing attention to the constructed nature of the image. It functions as a critical interruption, casting doubt on the authenticity of emotion when mediated through visual codes. In semiotic terms, it disrupts the expected relationship between the signifier (the scene) and its assumed signifieds (resilience, suffering, endurance).

This tension highlights how hardship is visually coded: tropes like the stooped posture or barren landscape activate familiar emotional scripts. The image participates in this vocabulary just enough to be legible, before subverting it through ironic titling. This reframes the viewer’s role—from passive empathy to critical reflection. The goal is not to undermine emotional truth, but to interrogate how that truth is aestheticised and potentially consumed.

This strategy—pairing familiar imagery with disruptive titles—runs throughout Precious Poverty. The titles are interruptive. They resist immersion, stop the interpretive flow, and challenge assumptions about sincerity, genre, and the role of aesthetic affect in shaping social narratives.

Case Studies: Between Witness and Theatre

To better understand how artists challenge traditional expectations of how poverty and trauma are visualised, it is worth turning to those who employ performance, fantasy, and constructed imagery as “photographic staging”. These artists shift the question from “What does poverty look like?” to “How does poverty feel, echo, and displace through the body and imagination?” Their work forms a compelling alternative to realist orthodoxy.

Juno Calypso works through staged self-portraiture and uncanny domestic interiors to construct surreal, hyper-feminised dream spaces that critique gender roles, alienation, and emotional isolation. While her images may not address poverty explicitly, they operate within a register of magical realism—using fantasy to reveal discomfort, absurdity, and the pressures of conformity.

Trish Morrissey is known for her inserted performances into family album-style photographs. She reconstructs domestic scenes that challenge conventional ideas of belonging, memory, and femininity. Her work highlights how identity and social roles are performed and codified through photography, offering an oblique but potent critique of classed and gendered expectations.

Laia Abril, in her series The Epilogue and On Abortion, blends documentary evidence with conceptual strategies—staged material, archival fragments, and testimonial text—to explore trauma, grief, and structural inequality. Her nonlinear, emotionally charged narratives defy the conventions of documentary realism. Abril’s work exemplifies how constructed visual storytelling can offer rigorous alternatives to traditional modes of witnessing when confronting socially sensitive subjects like poverty and pain.

These artists underscore the false binary between witness and theatre, proving that a staged image can carry as much political urgency as a candid one—when shaped by distinct and intentional authorship.

Together, their practices reveal the porous boundaries between genres and the centrality of intentionality. While each artist deploys different aesthetic strategies—from Calypso’s surreal intimacy to Morrissey’s performative critique—the unifying thread is their deliberate, ethically grounded authorship.

What ultimately unites them is not form, but a rigorous engagement with ethics, visibility, and power. These artists work from within their communities or lived experiences, destabilising the hierarchy between observer and observed. My own series adopts a similar posture: staging scenes not to critically reflect on how poverty is seen, aestheticised, and misunderstood in dominant visual cultures. The viewer is not allowed to remain passive. The imagery demands engagement—emotional, intellectual, and moral. In each case, photography becomes not merely a mode of representation, but a space of negotiation: of authorship, agency, and meaning.

Conclusion

In developing Precious Poverty, I grappled with these questions—often uncomfortably. Can self-representation shield against exploitation, or does it risk narcissism? Can humour dismantle stereotypes, or does it trivialise trauma? The answers, I believe, lie not in binaries, but in balance.

This essay has explored how photography represents pain, poverty, and pathos—each a fraught, deeply politicised subject. Through theoretical grounding, historical reference, and contemporary case studies, I have situated my work within a lineage that questions the boundaries of realism, authorship, and affect. Photography is never neutral. Every decision—what to include, what to stage, how to frame—is political.

Ultimately, I argue that aesthetics and ethics are not opposing forces, they are potential collaborators. This dual commitment informs my practice: visual beauty operates as a rhetorical and communicative device. Yet even as I embrace hybridity, I remain attentive to the unresolved tensions—between accessibility and complexity, between performance and testimony—that mark this terrain. These tensions do not weaken the work; they make it intellectually and emotionally generative. To represent is to transform. But how we transform matters. This work affirms that ethics and aesthetics are not only compatible but co-dependent in socially engaged art. My goal is not to resolve these tensions, but to hold space for them—to create work that is emotionally charged, intellectually rigorous, and above all, ethically aware.

Looking ahead, there is scope to further interrogate how emerging technologies may shift our understanding of photographic truth. Plans to re-exhibit Precious Poverty in Barcelona are currently in development, with an emphasis on installation-based presentation, viewer interaction, and critical framing. As new tools—from algorithmic curation to immersive environments—reshape how images are made and seen, we must remain alert to how visual culture mediates power and authorship. Even in a landscape of synthetic imagery, the ethical stakes of representation remain human.

For me, the next phase of Precious Poverty may involve collaborative storytelling—inviting others facing economic precarity to participate in staged, magical-realist narratives of their own. The aim: to expand authorship, deepen empathy, and resist the reductive flattening of lives into single-frame stereotypes.

Equally, future research might examine how photographic education equips emerging practitioners to think critically about representation. How are students taught to consider their own positionality? What models are they shown? It is here—at the point of production, not just consumption—that many of the ethical dilemmas explored in this essay can be most meaningfully addressed. A photograph’s impact begins long before the shutter is pressed.

This question is not hypothetical. During the development of Precious Poverty, I was directly challenged by a tutor who asked, “Where are the eviction papers? Where is this visual evidence?” The question was not an oversight, nor a denial of metaphor’s value, but a reflection of deeply embedded assumptions within photographic discourse—assumptions that equate realism with legitimacy. This wasn't simply a question about missing documentation, but about the legitimacy of emotional truth within aesthetic hierarchies shaped by documentary authority. This encounter raised a critical question: what kinds of truth are we trained to value? If students are primarily shown models rooted in realism, reportage, or evidentiary aesthetics, their ability to explore symbolic or affective forms of narrative may be constrained. It becomes essential, then, that photographic education not only encourages students to reflect on their own positionality, but also broadens the aesthetic frameworks through which lived experience can be meaningfully represented.