Somebody is in this piece, and it is not you

The commonest failures, named

Most work about other people goes wrong in a small number of recognisable ways, and naming them makes them avoidable.

• The single story. One narrative stands in for a whole group, so every piece about a place is about poverty, or struggle, or resilience. Each individual piece may be true. The aggregate is a caricature, and the people in it are the ones who have to live next to it.
• The poverty aesthetic. Desaturating a photograph, shooting from above, choosing the most degraded surroundings: a set of visual choices that signal hardship and were made by somebody who was leaving afterwards.
• Decoration. A person included for their visible difference and given nothing to do. In casting this is a face in the third row; in writing it is a name with no line.
• The backdrop. Somebody’s home, work or ceremony used as texture behind a story about someone else.
• The composite. A character assembled from several real people and presented as one, which resembles nobody and cannot be checked.

The question that catches most of it

Would the person in this piece recognise themselves, and would they recognise it as fair?

Not would they be flattered. Fair. It is the same test as for a photograph’s crop, applied to a whole piece, and it catches the majority of ordinary failures before they reach anyone.

Consultation, done properly

The principle from disability rights (nothing about us without us) generalises cleanly. If a piece is about a group you are not in, people from that group should be involved before it is finished, not shown it afterwards as a courtesy.

What that means in practice:

1. Early, not at sign-off. Consultation after the edit is locked is a request for approval, not consultation, and everybody can tell.
2. Pay people. Expertise about a community is expertise. Asking for unpaid labour from people with less power than you is part of the problem you are trying not to reproduce.
3. Accept a no. If the answer comes back that the piece should not be made this way, the consultation has worked. Treating only agreement as a valid outcome means you were seeking cover.
4. Show it before publication, in full, with time to respond.

Language, names and the small things that are not small

• Spell names correctly, including diacritics, and ask rather than guess. A misspelt name in a caption is a statement about how much attention the subject was worth.
• Use the terms people use about themselves, which frequently differ from the terms institutions use about them, and which change.
• Ask about honorifics and forms of address rather than defaulting to the convention you grew up with.
• Avoid the passive constructions that remove agency (were given, were helped, benefited from) unless that is what happened.

Casting and stock imagery

When you are choosing images rather than making them, the same failures appear in a different form. A stock library will happily supply you with a diverse group of people arranged around a laptop, none of whom has anything to do with your subject.

The better path is the one already argued: photograph the actual people, with consent, doing the actual thing. If that is impossible and stock is the answer, choose images where the person is doing something specific rather than modelling an attribute, and check the licence conditions about portraying identifiable people in a negative context.

The limitation, which is important

Consultation is not a permission slip, and this is where well-intentioned processes go wrong.

One person does not speak for a group. Two people from the same community will frequently disagree, and there is no arrangement of consultants that converts a contested judgement into a safe one. A consultation used as protection, so that responsibility can be transferred if criticism arrives, is worse than none, because it spends somebody’s time and name on your defence.

What consultation actually does is narrower and still worth a great deal: it surfaces things you did not know, it catches errors of fact and framing, and it gives people a say in how they are shown. The decision stays yours, the responsibility stays yours, and if the piece is wrong you cannot hand it to the people you asked.

The other limitation is worth saying plainly: sometimes the right call is that this is not your story to tell, and the better contribution is to help somebody inside it tell their own. That is a real answer, not a failure of nerve, and it is available more often than people acting in good faith tend to consider.