Ethical Framework
Principles Governing the Practice
The current practice operates under eight declared ethical principles. They are not aspirations or general intentions. They are operative conditions that govern what is photographed, what is not photographed, what data is used, how digital heritage is cited, what percentage of sales is devoted to solidarity, and what relationship is maintained with institutions. They apply across all current projects.
1. Protected absence
No documentary images of real migrants are used. No photojournalistic archive material, no portraits of the rescued, no images retrieved from social media. The image of the racialized body wrapped in a blanket is protected in the work through its absence. It does not appear. This principle is not reversible.
2. Subject without identity, with signed consent
When the work requires bodily presence (as in the series Monochrome Bodies), the person photographed always appears fragmented—never with a complete face or an identifiable bodily mark in any shot, and with no identifying metadata in the digital file. A signed image-rights release exists, revocable in writing at any time.
3. Absence of the migrant figure
The work does not produce or reproduce visual figures of migrant persons by any means. This includes direct photographic capture, algorithmic generation, appropriation of photojournalism, and the use of press archive material. The image of the migrant subject remains outside the work. This absence is a prior ethical position that rejects the documentary grammar of the racialized body as aesthetic material.
When the work employs official data on mortality, disappearance, or migration, it operates at a statistical level. It may generate trajectories, distributions, or speculative scenarios, declared as such, without producing visual figures of the subjects those data reference. The number admits speculative reflection. The figure does not.
4. Data with live traceability and a hierarchy of sources
The figures change every week. The work neither dates them within the piece nor claims to offer a consolidated statistic. Each piece that includes data also carries a QR code linking to the original source—live and updatable. An explicit hierarchy of authoritative primary sources is established for each record: the National Mining Association and the London Bullion Market Association for the price of gold; the IOM’s Missing Migrants Project and Caminando Fronteras for deaths at sea; the official archives of World Press Photo, Magnum Photos, Sotheby’s Photography Auctions, and Artnet Analytics for the photography market.
5. Cited use of digital heritage
The digital reproduction of A. Boogert’s manuscript used in Archival Tints comes from the open-access repository of the Bibliothèque Méjanes in Aix-en-Provence. Its use honors the obligation to cite the source, with full credit on every exhibited piece, in every published catalogue, and on the sales specification sheet where applicable.
6. Quantified operative solidarity
10% of the net sale price of any original piece from the series—as well as royalties from limited editions and from the fanzine when sold—is allocated to rescue and reception organizations in the Mediterranean. The list of recipient organizations is chosen on the basis of operational capacity and documented solvency, reviewed annually. Fulfillment of the commitment is evidenced in documentation.
7. Transparency regarding method and artificial intelligence
The photographic work does not use images generated by artificial intelligence. All photographs in the series Monochrome Bodies, Archival Tints, Solid Data, and Formula are direct captures, without synthesis. When the work employs algorithmic generation as a layer within a composite piece (as in the series Amerika), this is declared on each piece’s specification sheet. When the work uses digital simulation tools for mockups of projects not yet realized (as in Gold Route or the gallery visualization of Drift), it is declared as simulation and does not form part of the photographic work. The scientific molecular-modeling tools (ChimeraX, Avogadro) used in Golden Standard are likewise declared on the specification sheet and constitute not a photographic image but a graphic representation.
8. Critical autonomy against co-optation
The work is committed to refusing sponsorships, acquisitions, or institutional collaborations that directly contradict the critique it advances. This includes border-externalization companies, insurers of migration routes, industries in the border-surveillance sector, and entities in the extractive gold-mining sector with a documented record of human-rights violations or unremediated mercury contamination.