Is it ever just a Peek?

This research analysis delves into ethical discrepancies regarding documentary-style photography. Photography has become a powerful medium and practice of both communication and social connection. One specific genre of photography that evokes questions of entitlement, social hierarchy, and ethical concerns regarding the politics of looking is documentary-style photography. Documentary photography involves the process of capturing impersonal human subjects within the guise of daily existence; typically, these moments of existence involve unromanticized and even unfiltered experiences. Research exploring the ethical concerns of surveillance, voyeurism, and perpetuating social hierarchies involved in documentary photography concludes that the outcomes and artistic spaces involved in promoting ‘othering’ between producer/consumer and subject matter are what maintain the inconclusive or nebulous standings on the ethics of documentary photography. A specific analysis of work by photographer Martin Parr highlights such debates and clarifies questions scholars prompt readers to reflect upon. Parr’s oeuvre alludes to a manipulation of lived experiences into spectacle. Viewers become enmeshed in a process of truth creation and confirmation, rather than objective viewership.