Why an ethics panel?

Our goal is to showcase thought-provoking photos that call attention to our impact and inspire us to live sustainably. We expect these photos to be challenging and that many will raise tough, but important issues such as environmental racism and exploitation.

Our competition has a responsibility to promote robust, transparent, and ethically informed consent practices in photography. We believe that providing leadership and education on respect for the rights and dignity of all people represented in imagery is an essential part of our responsibility as a photography platform. We welcome and encourage feedback, if you would like to get in touch, you can reach us at epoty@ciwem.org.

Introducing the 2022 ethics panel

Savannah Dodd

Savannah is an anthropologist and photographer, and founding director of the Photography Ethics Centre. This organisation aims to raise awareness about the ethics of taking and sharing visual media. Savannah is a member of the Ethical Journalism Network’s UK Committee and of the board of Source Magazine. She is currently pursuing her PhD in anthropology at Queen's University Belfast where she is examining the ethics of archiving photographs in a post-conflict context.​

Shaminder Dulai

Shaminder Dulai is a 13-time Emmy-nominated, award-winning photo / video journalist, writer, editor, educator, curator and creative technologist with 20+ years of experience producing stories. He crafts journalistic narratives with intimacy, immediacy and impact, empowering communities to make informed choices and understand complex issues with empathy. He has led departments at NBC, Newsweek, PBS Seattle, and worked on teams at The New York Times, The Daily Beast, Hearst Newspapers and many more. ​

Melissa Groo

Melissa is a wildlife conservation photographer and writer. She writes for Outdoor Photographer magazine, and is a contributing editor to Audubon magazine. She’s an Associate Fellow with the International League of Conservation Photographers. Melissa regularly advises on ethics in nature photography, and she is particularly passionate about promoting ethical fieldcraft that honours wild animals and keeps their welfare and wildness paramount. Melissa’s work has been published in Smithsonian, Audubon, National Geographic, Outdoor Photographer, National Wildlife, and Natural History.

Vanessa Okoth-Obbo

Vanessa is a journalist and communications professional with a passion for storytelling, multi-media production and cultural criticism. She has extensive experience in freelance reporting and external communications in post-conflict development contexts; her work has appeared in the Columbia Journalism Review, the Village Voice, Pitchfork, MTV News, the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian and more. She is a graduate of the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.​

Aidan White

Aidan is the President of the Ethical Journalism Network, a global campaign promoting ethics, good governance and self-regulation in media. He is a journalist and was formerly General Secretary of the International Federation of Journalists. In 2003 he founded the International News Safety Institute. He has been an adviser on media policy to the United Nations and the Council of Europe and has written extensively on media standards. He is the author of the book To Tell you the TRUTH (2008), and he wrote Human Rights and a Changing Media Landscape (2011).

Ethics proceedings

This year we added a section to our competition rules concerning ethical practices in photography, and we introduced an ethics panel. The panel is active at two different stages within the competition proceedings.

We shared updated competition rules and guidelines with the panel, reviewed their comments and updated the rules and guidelines according to their recommendations. The ethics panel will be involved in the selection process after submissions close and before the judging panels receives any photos to review, where they will disqualify any photos that do not comply with our ethical standards.

Through this process we hope to ensure that any photos selected for publication have a robust grounding in ethical photography practices, and represent their subject matter with dignity and respect.