In most serious documentary photography exhibitions, there’s a moment when you can’t help but feel uneasy, as if the person in the picture didn’t really want to be there. The industry has endured this unease for many years, mostly in silence. This silence is starting to end—not in scholarly publications or editorial memos, but in the actual programming choices made by festivals that have determined that vulnerability is a duty to be carried rather than a resource to be exploited.
In this sense, FOTODOKS in Munich, which held its 2025 edition in October, is something to be aware of. The festival’s programming philosophy is based on modern documentary photography, and it consistently raises ethical issues. Who is the image’s author? What benefits does the subject receive from being observed? Although these questions are not new, they are being asked with a greater degree of seriousness, and more significantly, they are starting to influence which works are shown and which are not.
Contrary to popular belief, the change is more structural. Documentary photography followed an implicit hierarchy for a large portion of the 20th century: the photographer saw, the subject was seen, and the audience consumed. Festivals and editors honored the one pivotal image that could halt a reader in the middle of a page, condensing suffering into a composition that was worthy of recognition. In that tradition, there was real craft. Beneath it, however, was a sort of extractive logic that used the darkest moments of other people as raw material for narrative.
Subject agency, or the question of what the person being photographed truly wants from the interaction, is evolving from a personal ethic to a curatorial criterion. Photographers in this new field describe procedures that resemble negotiation more than hunting. long-term connections made before the camera shows up. editorial control that is shared. Projects that require years as opposed to weeks. The final product is perhaps much more honest, but it is also slower, messier, and more difficult to package into a festival wall.
There is a perception in the industry that this change was occurring covertly within individual practices long before festivals gave it official recognition. The discomfort of the invisible photographer—the way an image gives the impression of transparent observation while completely hiding the curator’s intent—has been discussed in writing and speech by photographers such as Finland’s Nelli Palomäki. In response, some photographers have disrupted the notion that documentary photos are neutral windows rather than manufactured arguments by making themselves visible within their own work. There is now more institutional support for that type of reflexivity.
Whether this is a one-time event in a longer cycle or a permanent reorientation is still unknown. The neutrality of Walker Evans in the middle of the 20th century gave way to something much more subjective, and since the 1980s, the distinctions between documentary, portrait, and art photography have been gradually blurring. The current focus on ethics and vulnerability may be just the most recent development in a longer history of formal experimentation. However, it seems to be more than just fashion. It seems as though the industry is actually considering what it owes the subjects of its photographs.
In this climate, festivals’ actions are more important than they once were. A programming team’s decision to prioritize collaborative, long-form work over parachute journalism sends a signal to the entire ecosystem, including future students determining what kind of work is worthwhile, grant-givers, editors, and photographers working in the field. That’s a big deal. There is more to the question of who is viewed, how, and on whose terms than just aesthetics. It has to do with power. Finally, documentary photography is beginning to treat it as such.
