Last week, I got an email from Benjamin Chesterton of duckrabbit asking my opinion of a post he’d written on the ethics involved in a series of photos by Italian photographer Marco Vernaschi of child sacrifice in Uganda supported by the Pulitzer Center.

(Full disclosure: I was the recipent of funding from the Pultizer Center along with Jina Moore in 2009.)

Before I even clicked on the link, I knew which photos he was talking about. I’d seen them, months earlier, and they struck me as somewhat off. I couldn’t put my finger on it exactly, but the dark and eerie photos didn’t look anything like the country I’d lived in for two years. I was in Uganda in January when I saw them and put up this tweet:

The blogosphere has plenty of opinions and posts about the controversy. See here, or here, or here, or here, or any of a dozen other places, including responses from the Pulitzer Center director Jon Sawyer and the photographer himself.

A quick summary of the controversy: photographer exhumes small girl murdered for sacrificial purposes to take photos of her body, then gives her family money, then clearly changes his story more than once and makes people suspect every “fact” in the situation may not be so “factual.”

First, kudos to Benjamin for bringing all of this to light. Second, I’m glad to see photographers and others who have opinions on something other than photoshop manipulation, which has always seemed beside the point to me.

Third, it’s clear that regardless of the specifics, Marco has made some dubious decisions. I think that’s something you can see in his photos, and perhaps why I felt some much discomfort when I first viewed them – not because he was uncovering something shocking, but because something was wrong. I’ve always said that how you take a photo affects how the photo looks.

Finally, I don’t like Marco’s photos because they don’t tell me anything I don’t know. They only make me think about him, and what he did to get into the particular situation that resulted in the photo.

Here’s the photo on the homepage of his website. It doesn’t tell me anything about the world or the people in the image, it just makes me think why on earth did that dude and those two women let him stand above him while they were having a sexual encounter? And what did Marco say to get them to agree to this? It’s voyeurism - nothing more.

Marco’s actions were clearly unethical. But enough has been said about that already that I don’t feel the need to say more here. Instead, I’d like to end with a word about a photographer’s approach. Did he have the best of intentions? Perhaps. But did he have his subjects’ best interests as his primary priority? No. He says he exhumed the body so that he could expose a wide spread problem. But had he instead respected the needs of the people with whom he was interacting, that respect would show in the photograph and ultimately it would do far more to promote discussion on the issue of child sacrifice than his sensationalist photographs manage to do. All his photographs manage to do is promote discussions about him.