The ethics of researching unethical images: A story of trying to do good research without doing bad things

•Researchers should tell stories about their methods in order to reflect on research ethics.•Working with visual data raises ethical challenges related to looking and sharing.•One solution to the ethical challenge of looking is “one-and-done data collection.”•Two solutions to the ethical challenge of sharing are (1) asking for consent, and (2) offering “ethical ekphrasis.”•“Ethical ekphrasis” is the practice of creating a thick verbal description of visual data, rather than or in addition to the images themselves, for ethical purposes. In this article, I tell the story of my research on the topic of “strangershots,’ which are photographs of strangers taken, shared, and mocked online without their subjects’ knowledge or consent. I interweave a narrative of how I conducted my strangershots research with the argument that researchers must develop situationally and ethically responsive methods for working with user-generated digital images. This argument focuses on two of the many ethical quandaries that haunt our efforts to research and write about unethical digital images: looking and sharing. I begin by describing these specific ethical quandaries and providing concrete examples of them from my own research experiences. I then offer actionable strategies for addressing these quandaries. To address ethical problems of looking, I offer the process-oriented methodological strategy of one-and-done data collection. To address ethical problems of sharing, I offer the dual circulation-oriented strategies of asking image subjects for consent and of deploying “ethical ekphrasis,” or intentional description, in place of image reproduction.