[Leica] Photojournalists and permission

[abridge at gmail.com (Adam Bridge)]

It's a tricky issue, isn't it? The more I think about it the more
complex it comes.

If one is shooting in a public place, in the United States, then there
is no expectation of privacy (yet). It's fine to take photographs of
people holding hands, kissing, skipping, crossing the street, looking
in shop windows.

But we're arguing that there is a special CLASS of people who, for
whatever reason, shouldn't be photographed or at least their images
shouldn't be shown here and the homeless are top on that list.

Why? Well I suspect the short-form answer is to protect them from
exploitation of their situation since many suffer from serious
illnesses which keep them from protecting their own interests, indeed
they are barely surviving.

But I see "homeless" all the time panhandling for money with home-made
signs. I've thought about doing a project on them because I see so
many around the area shopping centers (small ones mostly.) Now I
believe that they are probably making a better living doing this than
if they worked at MacDonald's (or so an article a few years ago in the
Sacramento Bee would us understand) so they aren't pushing shopping
carts around with their belongings in them, talking to beings only
they see. Are THESE people under the "don't photograph the homeless"
clause?

Absolute rules like this are simply silly. Underneath them should be
compassion. Am I caring about this person or are they just a symbol?
Am I taking away from them a dignity I would give to someone else?

The news folks make these kinds of judgements - or rather their
editors do, I hope. I hope the news photographers are out there taking
pictures and some of them are going to be factual and terrible and
even cruel because that's the world, that's life, that's where we all
live. And their editor worries about what's appropriate. (The
controversy over the tsunami dead images in the New York Times is a
case in point.)

For art photographers, or street photographers, the question always
has to deal with seeing people as people, because if we stop that, and
see them only as objects, as just patterns of light and shadow, then
we are discarding the fundamentals of interactions between people and
we have changed them into things. This is the fundamental catastrophe
of our time -- that we are so profoundly good at making people into
things which lets us hate them, kill them, turn away from them.

There ARE no rules - just compassion, and caring, and (I hope)
kindness. The rest is conscience.

Adam Bridge