How to talk about consent and Misery Porn?

In addition, misery is not only poverty. It is a condition that causes a person's lack of dignity, so the reading goes beyond economic hardship. This is an opinion shared by Christian Escobar Mora, a photojournalist who has covered the Colombian armed conflict since 2002 for international agencies and media. For him, misery porn depends on a porn aesthetic.

EscobarMora explains: "It is a direct fascination with human misery. That is why the color of yellow journalism (sensationalism) is created  by the one who documents it, but undoubtedly by the one who receives it as well." This not only refers to the media, but also to the reader, who can have harmful intentions with an image, twisting it for other's purposes.

"To give you an example, photographs that I have taken of combats between the Colombian guerrilla and the Army have been used years later to assure that those guerrilla members were indigenous people who participated in government processes. These are false and uninformed assertions and, therefore, there has been a porn aesthetic, because the reason for being of these people is ignored and my photos are used to create a political conditioning", recalls the photojournalist.

When Ospina and Mayolo premiered their mockumentary in 1977, they read a manifesto explaining what misery porn  was - a document barely two-thirds of a page long. Analyses have expanded the definition and implications of the famous term, with more than 6600 articles published in Google Scholar and hundreds of comments and discussions on social networks.

There is no freedom of interpretation to tell a story

Juanita Escobar, documentary photographer, adds that misery porn also manifests itself in other scenarios entirely different from those raised in the film. This includes some NGOs’ towards human tragedy, when despair must  comply with certain factors that "are enough" to access their subsidies.

"They are organizations that have boxes and squares of a form of how the world works, of how the vulnerable populations they want to support are. That is why when they send photographers to confirm those preconceived ideas - to check those boxes. In other words, there is no freedom of interpretation to tell a story. There is no need to look for the Guinness Record for the Saddest Story," Escobar explains.

For the documentary photographer, understanding what is behind the word ‘consent’ is key to avoid such approaches: "It is a relationship that is formed over time and through an agreement that allows the exchange of information on both sides, without imposing my personal vision on the other.”

The superficial discourse of porn-misery

Although 'Agarrando Pueblo' talks about the 'how' but not the 'what', there are also misreadings that believe that misery porn already exists when a vulnerable situation is documented. This ignores not only the message of the mockumentary, which features actors from impoverished communities themselves, but also much of the filmography of Ospina and Mayolo, who worked extensively with such populations for many years.

Anthropologist and photographer Jorge Panchoaga believes that in addition to the fact that misery porn can reduce the ability to analyse a work from a single focus, it also cannot be the guide to ethics and consent.

"Feminism has changed many ethical things that before seemed normal. So have decolonial and anti-racist approaches. To think that misery porn is the key to understanding all these cultural and ethical social movements is to believe too much in the concept," he stresses.

The consequences can be worse, since the term is sometimes used as a tool to censor and create inaccurate interpretations about a reality. A mistaken reading can lead us to believe that certain social issues are not worthy of being documented.

The photojournalist EscobarMora states: "There is no real reason for not showing that reality, far from personal or unconscious intentions that are tied to a religion, government, institution, etc. Not showing is also an absence of values.”