From: Shannon Stoney (sstoney@pdq.net)
Date: 09/22/02-12:30:47 PM Z
Marco wrote:
>
>The real point is that freedom to photograph people without their permission
>also implies freedom to distort their image, to catch them at their worst,
>or to tack onto their picture, some title just a bit short of slander.
>That's all perfectly legal.
>
I see photography fairly often that does this, even though it was
done WITH the subject's permission. Recently there was a show at the
Blaffer Gallery at the University of Houston, about children and
adults with cranial and facial abnormalities. I had to admit it was
a bit fascinating, but I was sort of ashamed of my own fascination
with looking at people who had these handicaps; it seemed
voyeuristic. And there wasn't much that was interesting about these
photographs other than the fact that their subjects were
"funny-looking." It seemed as if the photographer was exploiting
these people in order to get people to look at her photographs.
I also feel uncomfortable with photographs of poor people, made by
middle class people. One of my teachers once suggested to us
students that we photograph the recent immigrants who congregate on a
certain street in Houston waiting for day jobs as laborers. That
felt wrong to me, to photograph people at their most vulnerable.
(Also, some of those people may have reason to fear photographers, as
most of them are illegal and undocumented.) For the same reason the
satirizing of poor people, albeit poor people of seventy years ago,
in the recent fashion issue of the New Yorker, struck me as being in
poor taste. Maybe I feel especially sensitive about this because
Appalachian people were photographed ad nauseam in the sixties, to
the point that they began to resent outsiders coming in to their
communities to expose their "backwardness" to the world, sometimes
under the guise of "social concern." One deranged man actually shot
a filmmaker from Canada because he was so tired of Appalachian people
being portrayed as backward and ignorant. (I don't have a problem
with Shelby Lee Adams so much because he's from there and has known
his subjects since childhood. Also he writes a lot of text about the
people's stories to go with the pictures, so that you understand them
as they are, not as how your prejudice might suppose them to be.)
I think your gut feeling is the best guide to your own ethics about
photographing people either on the street without their permission,
or with their permission in their own homes and communities. If you
feel a little queasy about it, maybe you shouldn't do it. Certainly
sharing your photographs with your subjects before you show them to
the world is some sort of insurance against exploiting people. If
they think they look good, it's probably ok.
--shannon
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : 10/01/02-03:47:10 PM Z CST