©Savannah Dodd, from the project Waka

Photography Educator is a monthly series on Lenscratch. Once a month, we celebrate a dedicated photography teacher by sharing their insights, strategies and excellence in inspiring students of all ages. These educators play a vital role in student development, acting as mentors and guides who create environments where students feel valued and supported, fostering confidence and resilience.

I was looking at the SPE conference website in February, reviewing the schedule and range of topics being presented, when educator Savannah Dodd’s talk Photography Ethics in the Classroom caught my eye. At a time when photography is increasingly complex, shaped by questions of consent and representation, I was heartened to see this topic addressed at SPE. As I looked further into Savannah’s work, I discovered a depth and range in her photographic practice that I’m excited to share below.

Waka
While I was working for an NGO in southern rural Uganda, I was tasked with creating a photographic series about the surrounding community. I did not want to create photographs that reproduce stereotypes, so I looked for something that challenged my expectations of rural Sub-Saharan Africa.

©Savannah Dodd, from the project Waka

©Savannah Dodd, from the project Waka

©Savannah Dodd, from the project Waka

©Savannah Dodd, from the project Waka

©Savannah Dodd, from the project Waka

©Savannah Dodd, from the project Waka

ES: Tell me about your background in anthropology and photography and how this led to your current teaching.
SD: My background in anthropology is very integral to the way that I teach ethics. In anthropology, we talk a lot about power, and I think photography ethics is ultimately about power. It is about understanding the power that you wield when you make and share visual media, and it is about choosing to wield that power responsibly. Anthropologists are also concerned with positionality, considering how their own identity may shape or bias their research. This reflexive process is also an important aspect of my teaching about photography ethics. In many ways, my teaching is actually a practice of translating anthropological concepts to make them accessible to and applicable for photographers and others working with photorealistic images.
ES: I am very interested in the Photography Ethics Centre that you founded in 2017. What was the catalyst for the evolution of this Centre?
SD: Photography has been a part of my life since my teens, but I did not pursue it seriously until after my master’s degree. In 2015, I graduated from my master’s in the Anthropology and Sociology of International Development and I got a job working at an NGO in Thailand. After a brief stint at the NGO, I decided that it was not a good fit, and I began volunteering at photography exhibitions and festivals in the region. At these events, I wanted to have conversations with other photographers about the ethics of asking for consent, how they think about their impact, and what their responsibility is as imagemakers – but I quickly realized that I was raising ethical questions that many people had never considered. I realized that my education in anthropology has prepared me with an awareness of ethics that has guided my own photography practice, but that this awareness is not universal. I realized that there is a gap in ethical understanding among many photographers, and that this is a gap that I can fill. In 2016, I ran pilot workshops on photography ethics in Thailand and Vietnam. Then I settled in Northern Ireland where I took part in a start-up accelerator program to found the Photography Ethics Centre.
ES: What kind of classes do you offer at the Photography Ethics Centre and what is the demographic of the students?
SD: We offer workshops for photographers, videographers, and others who make or use photorealistic visual media. Our workshops cover a wide range of topics, genres, and uses, for example: implementing informed consent, decolonising visual language, photographing trauma with dignity, and using visual media in academic research. In recent years, our teaching has also included the ethics of AI image generation. Usually, we partner with an institution to deliver a workshop for their members or network. This has meant that the demographic of workshop participants has varied greatly, from first year photography students to professional photojournalists with 30 year’s of experience. We deliver these workshops both online and in person. We also offer a series of self- paced online courses on photojournalism and documentary photography ethics which are available on demand.

©Savannah Dodd, from the project Waka

©Savannah Dodd, from the project Waka

©Savannah Dodd, from the project Waka

©Savannah Dodd, from the project Waka

ES: What key insights or skills do you hope your students gain through participating in your workshops or online classes?
SD: I hope that students leave feeling more confident in how they navigate ethical decisions in their photography practice. It is extremely difficult to make ethical decisions in the moment, and often these decisions are made in a split second. By gaining experience of weighing up ethical considerations in a safe environment among peers, I hope that students will be better prepared to respond to ethical dilemmas when they occur.
Moreover, I hope that they leave feeling better able to have conversations about ethics with other photographers. Ethical debates can evoke strong emotions and can be very polarising, making it difficult to have constructive conversations. I hope that the people who attend our workshops feel better able to both offer and receive feedback about ethical decisions in photography.
ES: What career accomplishments are you most proud of?
SD: I was very honored to receive the Education Award from the International Visual Literacy Association in 2024. I also thoroughly enjoyed delivering my TEDx talk titled “Changing the world with visual media ethics” in 2023. Right now, I am writing a book on visual media ethics, and I think, once that is published, I will be very proud of that!
ES: How do you integrate your experience and success as an artist into your teaching practice?
SD: I am able to draw on my own experiences as a photographer, and I often use my own photographs as examples. In particular, I like to share my mistakes. I think it is incredibly important that we approach conversations about photography ethics with a willingness to be vulnerable, and I think the best way that I can encourage students to be vulnerable is by demonstrating vulnerability myself. The photographs I took 10 or 15 years ago are not necessarily the same photographs that I would take today – and that is okay! It shows that I have learned, I have grown, and I have developed my way of thinking about the ethics of my images. But I like to share some of my old photographs and invite feedback. Often, I do not reveal that it is my photograph until after students have critiqued it, because I don’t want them to hold back. I think that this has proven to be a very useful way of teaching vulnerability.
ES: What is your vision for the future of photography education?
SD: I would love to see photography programs dedicating more time to ethics. I’ve learned that many photography programs carve out just one session within a broader course module for ethics. I’ve been told by others that ethics is sort of sprinkled throughout the course, without any time specifically ringfenced for ethics. I believe that this is insufficient. It takes time to read about other perspectives, to consider the ethical implications, and to develop one’s own ethical framework. Additionally, it would be great if more programs asked their students to write their own Statement of Ethics. This is an initiative that we launched a few years ago, asking people who work with photography to commit to writing their own Statement of Ethics, a written declaration of a person’s guiding ethical principles and a description of how they enact those principles in their photography practice. While I know of several lecturers who have incorporated this task into their students’ coursework, it would be great to see this become more prevalent. For reference, here is my Statement of Ethics.

Thank you Savannah! More of Savannah’s work below.

My photographic work focuses on themes of health, including human health, the health of the ecosystems in which we live, and the relationships between the two. I work with both digital and film cameras, and I experiment with ecological alternatives to traditional chemicals used in analogue photographic processes. Alignment between medium, method, and message is central to my practice. 

Herbarium of Photographic Emulsions
These anthotypes photograms are made to document the photosensitive properties of native plants on the Ards Peninsula. Anthotype refers to a photographic process that uses photosensitive extracts from plants and UV exposure from the sun to create prints. I have made photosensitive emulsions from plants that I foraged on the land where I live, and I applied the emulsions on cotton rag paper. I also pressed cuttings of the plants, enabling me to create anthotype prints of the plant that was used to make the emulsion. For example, the anthotype print of clover was made with clover emulsion.

©Savannah Dodd, Herbarium of Photographic Emulsions, Ards Art Centre, 2023

©Savannah Dodd, Herbarium of Photographic Emulsions, Bramble

©Savannah Dodd, Herbarium of Photographic Emulsions, Hedge Vetch

©Savannah Dodd, Herbarium of Photographic Emulsions

About Savannah