While reading Angela Garcia’s Reading Righteous Dopefiend with my Mother, I was inclined to wonder the ethics of photography, and how much power a simple image can hold. Garcia says, “the one that affected my mother the most was the least explicit”. So, if the least explicit and simple image can provoke so much emotion, what might be the motive of taking much more explicit images? Do you think the ability relies on a photographer’s skills or does it depend on their motivation for taking a particular image? (Yutzi)

In Righteous Dopefiend, Jeff Schonberg describes his approach when photographing scenes as one rooted in the idea of cultural relativism, which he describes as:

suspending "moral judgment in order to understand and appreciate the diverse logics of social and cultural practices that ... evoke righteous responses and prevent analytical self-reflection" (7).

In other words, cultural relativism looks at analyzing a situation under the specific social and cultural contexts in which it is taking place.

Schonberg later talks about the double-edged nature of photography, in which it not only speaks a "thousand words," but also "a thousand deceptions" (14). Specifically, he highlights how the meaning of photographs shifts based on its context.

With these two ideas in mind, how do the photos in the first 45 pages of the book gain meaning through contextualization? What changes about the photos--is it just their general message, or do elements of the photo (style, technique, color, etc.) also gain new meaning? (Sidharth)