The Ethics of Exploitation.
Beauty, betrayal, and thievery.
The men I speak of evaporate. All that remains of them is what remains of me. I exist through them. They exist through me. In the gradual dissolve of life, we strive, we fight, we love. These men did all that, yet never cried. If they did, they disguised their tears like puddles morphing into clouds.
I knew from the first moment that I was an outsider amongst them. I didn’t belong, but counted myself lucky to be with them. If their penance had a name it would be the pursuit of absolute nothingness. ‘Are you worthy?’ Was the question that glittered in the drains. I would be the one to treat them as gleaming. To some that was enough. To others I remained a stranger. Prickly. Like a street urchin hugging the pavement.
Taz climbed double-decker busses, surf legs spread and balanced as it took off across Waterloo bridge. Minesh slept free of charge in the utility rooms of any high-rise, tying his hammock between two metal poles and dozing off. Jim would wait for security to reach the top of the roof and salute them before he plunged off the edge. You should’ve seen their faces as he’d base jump to the streets below. These were not normal people. Their rareness gleamed in the darkness like phosphorescence.
We trespassed and we climbed buildings and we pursued the un-pursuable. Crimes committed were nothing but expression. Consequences doused out like cigarettes in busy ashtrays. Smoke rose from the cinders, and in it, we danced. At night, whistles escaped the lips of such men. Precursor poems for future renegades. These men rejected a world that rejected them, but their melodies spoke of hope.
The way a child stares at the homeless, I followed the pull of my curiosity. It is only now that I see the moral problem in my desire for such adrenaline fuelled adventure. I was no criminal. My motive was a selfish one. To study a people that thrived on the fringes of a world most look away from. To bottle it in creative expression.
Exploitation. To use the realness of flawed lives like ribbed paint across a canvas. In documentary films, in narrative screenplays, in fictitious stories. Transactional undercurrents flow beneath more than the dollar. An unspoken morality lies vulnerable and present beneath such trade. Capturing the lives of others must be done with care. Questions must be asked. Questions like,
What are the ethics of exploitation?
Remain ruthlessly honest.
Truth defies perfection.
It resists performance.
Be honest even when it's ugly.
Especially, when it’s ugly.
Honour the dignity of your subject.
The human being you’re capturing is not a symbol.
Not a device.
Not a character.
They are a universe.
To honour them is to refuse to flatten them.
Presence not projection.
Let it be what it is—not what you want it to be.
Don’t contort a moment to fit into a narrative arc.
Allow things to unfold the way a ribbon uncurls itself.
You can’t anticipate the shape of it’s movement, you can only watch.
Treat access as sacred.
Documenting an individual or a group of people is a fragile thing.
It requires trust.
Protect your access like it’s made of glass.
If they saw it, would they feel betrayed?
Let this be your checkpoint.
Your pause before publishing.
What would their silence say if they stood beside you?
Would their eyes soften—or turn away?
Don’t expose. Reveal.
Expose and you are a thief.
Reveal and you are a mirror.
Don’t romanticise suffering.
There is no beauty in pain.
There is beauty in what it is alchemised into.
Allow hardship to speak in it’s raw tongue, but don’t relish in it.
Don’t take what you wouldn’t give.
Remain sensitive to your subject’s concerns or fears.
Flip the script on yourself.
If you wouldn’t do it, don’t expect your subject to, either.
Aesthetic follows story.
A rich story will be excused for lacking aesthetic.
A rich aesthetic can never redeem a dull story.
Form follows function.
Keep asking, what are the ethics of exploitation?
Let this question haunt your edits.
Let it be the conscience of your pen and the battery of your camera.
There is no final answer, only continued listening.
At a certain point, all the adventures I sought blurred into an endless night. Another rooftop scaled. Another sight swallowed by a camera lens. I got older and began to count the things I couldn’t afford to lose. I realised my life was worth more than a few jpegs. I got caught one too many times by security guards that took their jobs too serious. I climbed a hundred foot crane that went nowhere. I realised that getting higher off the ground didn’t mean I could touch the sky. There was another way to reach the bluezone.
I cross the same viaduct I used to creep beneath and wondered if everything I mentioned occurred at all. Experiences blur into fiction. It’s then that I wonder if these stories are even mine to tell. Maybe that’s the cost of a creative life. You trade a clean conscience for a handful of fire.
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I really really liked this! 😊