[Over the years I have returned numerous times to the issue of what we loosely call “street photography” and its intersection with the rights of the subjects thereof, along with the broader questions connected to the rights of the subjects of photographs.
Some of those those ruminations have already appeared online, at this blog and elsewhere. Others have appeared only in print. As I hope these different commentaries show, I have a nuanced response to this complex set of questions. Click here for an index page with links to those already available at the blog.
This one appeared first in the Journal of Mass Media Ethics, Vol. 2, no. 2, March 1987. I republished it in my 1998 collection of essays, Depth of Field. Part 1 appears below; click here for Part 2.— A.D.C.]
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Private Lives in Public Places:
The Ethics of Street Photography (1)
Some frowned, some smiled, some muttered to themselves; some made light gestures, as if anticipating the conversation in which they would shortly be engaged; some wore the cunning look of bargaining and plotting, some were anxious and eager, some slow and dull; in some countenances were written gain; in others loss. It was like being in the confidence of all these people to stand quietly there, looking into their faces as they flitted past. In busy places, where each man has an object of his own, and feels assured that every other man has his, his character and purpose are written broadly in his face. In the public walks and lounges of a town, people go to see and be seen, and there the same expression, with little variety, is repeated a hundred times. The working-day faces comes nearer to the truth, and let it out more plainly.
— Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop[1]
In these words Dickens, himself an astute observer of public behavior, gesture, and expression, described Little Nell’s impressions of the streets of London. He was writing in 1841, only two years after the introduction of photography, largely uninfluenced by the new medium and certainly unaware of its future applications. Yet the urbanite fascination with the street which he presents through the innocent eyes of Nell manifested itself early in the history of photography — the genre can be traced back to Niépce and Daguerre — and eventually became one of the medium’s mainstays.
Much of the initial photography of “street scenes” was in its intent primarily informational and representational: John Thomson’s Street Life in London, the activist photojournalism of Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine, Eugène Atget’s obsessive Parisian survey. But, as this century progressed, more and more photographers took to the streets with concerns which were not those of the reporter but rather those of the novelist and poet — a search for resonant contrasts, rich metaphors, and found dramatic scenarios.
The appeal of the street to photographers is readily understandable. Blaise Cendrars wrote, “Le spectacle est dans la rue”[2] — the theatre is in the street — years before such performers as Judith Malina and Julian Beck of the Living Theatre carried it back out there again in the 1960s. As the one place in our culture where the most disparate elements are consistently thrown together in the most paradoxical juxtapositions, the street is a continually replenished source of extraordinary and surreal imagery.
Susan Sontag has argued that photography is “the only art that is natively surreal,” going on to ask, “What could be more surreal than an object … whose beauty, fantastic disclosures, emotional weight are likely to be further enhanced by any accidents that might befall it? It is photography,” she goes on, “that has best shown how to juxtapose the sewing machine and the umbrella, whose fortuitous encounter was hailed by a great Surrealist poet as an epitome of the beautiful.”[3] If that is indeed the case, what stage more ideal than the street could be conceived for such “chance meetings?”
Perhaps this is why Joel Meyerowitz, who began his professional career as a street photographer and has returned to the genre regularly, was quoted as saying in an interview, “I believe that street photography is central to the issue of photography — that it is purely photographic, whereas the other genres, such as landscape and portrait photography, are a little more applied, more mixed in with the history of painting and other art forms.”[4]
Whether or not the form is “purely photographic” may be debatable. But there can be no doubt that such diverse photographers as Irving Penn, Berenice Abbott, Harry Callahan, Arnold Genthe, Paul Strand, Brassaï, Lee Friedlander, Charles Gatewood, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, Imogen Cunningham, Walker Evans, Alfred Stieglitz and Jacques-Henri Lartigue have chosen to address at length one or another aspect of the street at some time in their lives, while others — Weegee, Robert Frank, and Helen Levitt, to name just a few — have built virtually their entire bodies of work within this form.
Robert Frank, “The Americans,” first U.S. edition, 1959.
In so doing, they have helped to redefine and expand the street as subject, transforming it from a reportorially oriented locus of social concern to the proscenium for a surreal theatrical centered around cultural symbols. They have also stretched the parameters of “the street” itself, so that it now includes the subway (and the interior of any other mode of public transportation), the park, the beach, the café — indeed, any and every venue that can be thought of as essentially “public.” This has led to a number of dilemmas, some of which can be thought of as imagistic, general, and philosophical, others of which are quite pragmatic, specific, legal and even legislative in nature.
•
For instance, it could be argued that, over the past century and a half, the integration of photography into the fabric of our culture has alerted us all to the impact of photographs and our own appearance therein. Thus it seems not unreasonable to suggest that this has generated a heightened self-consciousness in regard to the aspects of ourselves that we project when being photographed. This in turn implies that we may very well modify our behavior in ways both subtle and significant whenever a camera is in our presence (or even when we think we might be photographed). Perturbation theory applies to photography as well as physics: observation changes the nature of the thing observed.
Beyond that remarkable but general effect on everyone who lives in a photographic culture such as our own, photographs made of people on the street or in other public places without the consent of the subjects raise questions of ethics as well as aesthetics. What rights do we have as citizens over the control of representation of ourselves, and what rights do photographers have in regard to making images in public situations?[5]
A decade ago, this debate manifested itself in a widely-reported and much-discussed legal dispute in the courts, concerning a photograph of Clarence Arrington made by freelance photographer Gianfranco Gorgoni. Gorgoni photographed Arrington on the midtown streets of New York City, without his knowledge or consent. Gorgoni’s agency sold the image to the New York Times, without Arrington’s knowledge or consent. And the Times used the image as the cover illustration for a story in its Sunday Magazine titled “The Black Middle Class: Making It,”[6] again without Arrington’s knowledge or consent. Thus Arrington’s image, in a multiple of over a million copies, was distributed by the Times nationwide — expropriated by the photographer, his picture agency, and the Times editorial staff as a symbol of the Black middle-class experience.
Arrington’s response, with which I sympathize wholeheartedly, was to initiate a lawsuit for invasion of privacy that slowly worked its way through the courts.
Unfortunately, its eventual resolution appeared to hinge on a peculiar combination of factors, one being a technicality concerning Gorgoni’s freelance status, the other the practical problems and economic clout of the freelance photography trade and the enormous publishing industry it services. With that as the basis on which this suit was resolved, the ethical issue could hardly be effectively addressed by the legal system. That was regrettable, because it merited (and still merits) the most serious consideration — not only by lawyers, judges, photographers and others in the communications field, but by all of us.[7]
As I’ve just indicated, I think Arrington was in the right here. Despite the fact that, over the years, I’ve fought ardently for the rights of photographers, I also believe (in the words of Voltaire, if I recall correctly) that “your rights stop at the end of my nose.” I’ve had enough direct experience with photographers (particularly photojournalists and freelancers), picture agencies, and picture editors to have a clear understanding of the emphasis most of them place on ethical considerations.[8]
So my empathy with Arrington’s outrage has its roots in my personal history as well as in my critical understandings. Let me give just two examples, one of which concerns a photograph that was made, the other a photograph that wasn’t. …
(Part 1 I 2)
•
Notes
[1] The Old Curiosity Shop (New York: Heritage Press, 1941), pp. 329-330. (Original edition published in 1841.)
[2] Cendrars, Blaise, introductory note in A. M. Cassandre: Le spectacle est dans la rue (Montrouge, Seine: Draeger Freres, n.d.). Unpaginated.
[3] Sontag, Susan, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), pp. 51-52.
[4] Nilson, Lisbet, “Seeing the Light: On a Clear Day You Can See Joel Meyerowitz,” American Photographer, Vol. 7, no. 3, September 1981, pp. 40-53. Meyerowitz subsequently co-authored, with Colin Westerbeck, the book Bystander: A History of Street Photography (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1994). For my less than favorable review of that project, see DoubleTake, No. 4, Spring 1996, pp. 142-43.
[5] In the final version of this essay that appeared in Depth of Field, I reproduced “A Zapatista Position Paper on Photography” (1996) by Subcomandante Marcos. Rather than encumber this blog post with that lengthy polemic, I offer this link to it at the Photography Criticism CyberArchive.
The only extended study I know of that addresses the sociopolitical consequences of this behavioral pattern within photographic culture is Bernard Edelman’s Ownership of the Image: Elements for a Marxist Theory of Law (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1979). Edelman’s argument, first published in France in 1973, uses the legal rights (or lack of same) of photographers’ subjects as a tool for political and economic analyses of western culture. Edelman’s reference point is the legal system of France, whose laws on this issue differ in important respects from American jurisprudence. Yet the analogies are considerable, making Edelman’s inquiry a useful starting point for further exploration of this issue.
[6] Front cover, New York Times Magazine, December 3, 1978. You’ll find the case here.
[7] Less widely reported was the case of construction worker Carl De Gregorio, who was filmed walking along Madison Avenue holding hands with a female co-worker. Despite his appeal to the film crew, this footage was broadcast on CBS-TV in a May 1982 news segment on “Couples in Love in New York,” identifying the pair as “hard-hat lovers.” De Gregorio’s 30-year marriage collapsed as a result. His $1.6 million suit against CBS was dismissed because the broadcast named neither party and they were “filmed in a public place and can have no expectation of privacy in that location.” See Lake, Katharine, “Wrenching end to hard-hat’s suit,” New York Daily News, March 17, 1984, p. 9. You’ll find the case here.
[8] One indication comes from the American Society of Media Photographers, the oldest and largest professional organization for such working photographers. The ASMP’s “Code of Ethics” deals exclusively with how much photographers are entitled to charge for their work. [Note: This is no longer the case.]
As for the moral competence of picture editors, consider that Ruth Ansel — the Times Magazine art director who assigned Gorgoni to make the cover shot — told him that any well-dressed black person on the street would serve to represent the black middle class. (Does this mean they still all look alike?) Then, finding the initial court decision in favor of Arrington “a little outrageous,” she explained, “I don’t think there was any intent to classify him in any denigrating manner [by making him into a symbol of Black yuppification in an internationally circulated periodical!]. As a matter of fact, I thought it was a good photographic image.” (Emphasis added. Quoted in Malyon, T., “The Fateful Photograph,” Camera Arts, Vol. II, no. 5, October/November 1982, pp. 26ff.) For which, read: So long as we present an attractive image of you, it’s none of your business what we make you represent …
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This post supported by a donation from Arthur Ollman.
•
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Private Lives in Public Places (1)
Some of those those ruminations have already appeared online, at this blog and elsewhere. Others have appeared only in print. As I hope these different commentaries show, I have a nuanced response to this complex set of questions. Click here for an index page with links to those already available at the blog.
This one appeared first in the Journal of Mass Media Ethics, Vol. 2, no. 2, March 1987. I republished it in my 1998 collection of essays, Depth of Field. Part 1 appears below; click here for Part 2.— A.D.C.]
•
Private Lives in Public Places:
The Ethics of Street Photography (1)
Some frowned, some smiled, some muttered to themselves; some made light gestures, as if anticipating the conversation in which they would shortly be engaged; some wore the cunning look of bargaining and plotting, some were anxious and eager, some slow and dull; in some countenances were written gain; in others loss. It was like being in the confidence of all these people to stand quietly there, looking into their faces as they flitted past. In busy places, where each man has an object of his own, and feels assured that every other man has his, his character and purpose are written broadly in his face. In the public walks and lounges of a town, people go to see and be seen, and there the same expression, with little variety, is repeated a hundred times. The working-day faces comes nearer to the truth, and let it out more plainly.
— Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop[1]
In these words Dickens, himself an astute observer of public behavior, gesture, and expression, described Little Nell’s impressions of the streets of London. He was writing in 1841, only two years after the introduction of photography, largely uninfluenced by the new medium and certainly unaware of its future applications. Yet the urbanite fascination with the street which he presents through the innocent eyes of Nell manifested itself early in the history of photography — the genre can be traced back to Niépce and Daguerre — and eventually became one of the medium’s mainstays.
Much of the initial photography of “street scenes” was in its intent primarily informational and representational: John Thomson’s Street Life in London, the activist photojournalism of Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine, Eugène Atget’s obsessive Parisian survey. But, as this century progressed, more and more photographers took to the streets with concerns which were not those of the reporter but rather those of the novelist and poet — a search for resonant contrasts, rich metaphors, and found dramatic scenarios.
The appeal of the street to photographers is readily understandable. Blaise Cendrars wrote, “Le spectacle est dans la rue”[2] — the theatre is in the street — years before such performers as Judith Malina and Julian Beck of the Living Theatre carried it back out there again in the 1960s. As the one place in our culture where the most disparate elements are consistently thrown together in the most paradoxical juxtapositions, the street is a continually replenished source of extraordinary and surreal imagery.
Perhaps this is why Joel Meyerowitz, who began his professional career as a street photographer and has returned to the genre regularly, was quoted as saying in an interview, “I believe that street photography is central to the issue of photography — that it is purely photographic, whereas the other genres, such as landscape and portrait photography, are a little more applied, more mixed in with the history of painting and other art forms.”[4]
Whether or not the form is “purely photographic” may be debatable. But there can be no doubt that such diverse photographers as Irving Penn, Berenice Abbott, Harry Callahan, Arnold Genthe, Paul Strand, Brassaï, Lee Friedlander, Charles Gatewood, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, Imogen Cunningham, Walker Evans, Alfred Stieglitz and Jacques-Henri Lartigue have chosen to address at length one or another aspect of the street at some time in their lives, while others — Weegee, Robert Frank, and Helen Levitt, to name just a few — have built virtually their entire bodies of work within this form.
Robert Frank, “The Americans,” first U.S. edition, 1959.
In so doing, they have helped to redefine and expand the street as subject, transforming it from a reportorially oriented locus of social concern to the proscenium for a surreal theatrical centered around cultural symbols. They have also stretched the parameters of “the street” itself, so that it now includes the subway (and the interior of any other mode of public transportation), the park, the beach, the café — indeed, any and every venue that can be thought of as essentially “public.” This has led to a number of dilemmas, some of which can be thought of as imagistic, general, and philosophical, others of which are quite pragmatic, specific, legal and even legislative in nature.
•
For instance, it could be argued that, over the past century and a half, the integration of photography into the fabric of our culture has alerted us all to the impact of photographs and our own appearance therein. Thus it seems not unreasonable to suggest that this has generated a heightened self-consciousness in regard to the aspects of ourselves that we project when being photographed. This in turn implies that we may very well modify our behavior in ways both subtle and significant whenever a camera is in our presence (or even when we think we might be photographed). Perturbation theory applies to photography as well as physics: observation changes the nature of the thing observed.
Beyond that remarkable but general effect on everyone who lives in a photographic culture such as our own, photographs made of people on the street or in other public places without the consent of the subjects raise questions of ethics as well as aesthetics. What rights do we have as citizens over the control of representation of ourselves, and what rights do photographers have in regard to making images in public situations?[5]
Arrington’s response, with which I sympathize wholeheartedly, was to initiate a lawsuit for invasion of privacy that slowly worked its way through the courts.
As I’ve just indicated, I think Arrington was in the right here. Despite the fact that, over the years, I’ve fought ardently for the rights of photographers, I also believe (in the words of Voltaire, if I recall correctly) that “your rights stop at the end of my nose.” I’ve had enough direct experience with photographers (particularly photojournalists and freelancers), picture agencies, and picture editors to have a clear understanding of the emphasis most of them place on ethical considerations.[8]
So my empathy with Arrington’s outrage has its roots in my personal history as well as in my critical understandings. Let me give just two examples, one of which concerns a photograph that was made, the other a photograph that wasn’t. …
(Part 1 I 2)
•
Notes
[1] The Old Curiosity Shop (New York: Heritage Press, 1941), pp. 329-330. (Original edition published in 1841.)
[2] Cendrars, Blaise, introductory note in A. M. Cassandre: Le spectacle est dans la rue (Montrouge, Seine: Draeger Freres, n.d.). Unpaginated.
[3] Sontag, Susan, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), pp. 51-52.
[4] Nilson, Lisbet, “Seeing the Light: On a Clear Day You Can See Joel Meyerowitz,” American Photographer, Vol. 7, no. 3, September 1981, pp. 40-53. Meyerowitz subsequently co-authored, with Colin Westerbeck, the book Bystander: A History of Street Photography (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1994). For my less than favorable review of that project, see DoubleTake, No. 4, Spring 1996, pp. 142-43.
[5] In the final version of this essay that appeared in Depth of Field, I reproduced “A Zapatista Position Paper on Photography” (1996) by Subcomandante Marcos. Rather than encumber this blog post with that lengthy polemic, I offer this link to it at the Photography Criticism CyberArchive.
[6] Front cover, New York Times Magazine, December 3, 1978. You’ll find the case here.
[7] Less widely reported was the case of construction worker Carl De Gregorio, who was filmed walking along Madison Avenue holding hands with a female co-worker. Despite his appeal to the film crew, this footage was broadcast on CBS-TV in a May 1982 news segment on “Couples in Love in New York,” identifying the pair as “hard-hat lovers.” De Gregorio’s 30-year marriage collapsed as a result. His $1.6 million suit against CBS was dismissed because the broadcast named neither party and they were “filmed in a public place and can have no expectation of privacy in that location.” See Lake, Katharine, “Wrenching end to hard-hat’s suit,” New York Daily News, March 17, 1984, p. 9. You’ll find the case here.
[8] One indication comes from the American Society of Media Photographers, the oldest and largest professional organization for such working photographers. The ASMP’s “Code of Ethics” deals exclusively with how much photographers are entitled to charge for their work. [Note: This is no longer the case.]
As for the moral competence of picture editors, consider that Ruth Ansel — the Times Magazine art director who assigned Gorgoni to make the cover shot — told him that any well-dressed black person on the street would serve to represent the black middle class. (Does this mean they still all look alike?) Then, finding the initial court decision in favor of Arrington “a little outrageous,” she explained, “I don’t think there was any intent to classify him in any denigrating manner [by making him into a symbol of Black yuppification in an internationally circulated periodical!]. As a matter of fact, I thought it was a good photographic image.” (Emphasis added. Quoted in Malyon, T., “The Fateful Photograph,” Camera Arts, Vol. II, no. 5, October/November 1982, pp. 26ff.) For which, read: So long as we present an attractive image of you, it’s none of your business what we make you represent …
•
This post supported by a donation from Arthur Ollman.
•
And, as a bonus, I’ll send you a signed copy of my new book, poetic license / poetic justice — published under my full name, Allan Douglass Coleman, which I use for my creative writing.