Certification

Certification from the Photography Ethics Centre is an indicator of cultural competence, professionalism, and rigour. It signals that you take your responsibility as a photographer seriously, and that you are willing and able to tackle some of the key challenges encountered in your profession.

This certification does not rubber-stamp a photographer as “ethical.” Instead, it is a signpost to clients and employers that the individual has engaged with ethics education and has been made aware of many ethical issues in photography. It is also a beacon to other photographers across the industry that ethical literacy is an essential skill for photographers working today.

So many of the negative stories we see today about photographers and photography organisations could have been prevented if the people involved were ethically literate. Yet photographers have very few opportunities to access ethics education. Self-taught photographers are often unable to access training courses, and degree-seeking programmes often do not cover ethics in a meaningful way. This means that photographers – especially those working freelance – are largely left to figure it out for themselves, with very few resources and little institutional support to guide them on that journey.

Photographers without ethical literacy are at risk of unknowingly breaching national or international laws and ethical norms about privacy and confidentiality, copyright, consent, and child protection. These breeches can be costly – in terms of both time and reputation.

Beyond the individual photographer, photography ethics is important for our wider society. Photographs shape how we view the world, and when we take and share photographs, we are shaping how others view the world. This is an enormous responsibility.

In order to make ethics education accessible to photographers working today, we offer Photography Ethics Certification.

There are two pathways to certification. Photographers can either: (1) attend one of our workshops, or (2) complete all three modules in our online course series in Photojournalism Ethics.

After completing one of these two pathways, photographers will be invited via email to apply for certification by submitting their Statement of Ethics. If you have already attended a workshop delivered by the Photography Ethics Centre and have not yet been invited to apply for certification, please get in touch via email.

We review certification applications on a monthly basis. To avoid creating a hierarchy of ethical thinking, applications are assessed on a Pass/Fail basis. Photographers are awarded certification if they have actively participated in the workshop or online course, and have engaged meaningfully with the Statement of Ethics. Photographers who did not actively participate in the education component or did not engage meaningfully with the Statement of Ethics will receive feedback to indicate areas for improvement and will be invited to resubmit once.