This was long overdue! While there are those who feel anything and everything is fair game for what they want to photograph, and while our wonderful court appears precariously close to determining we have no inherent right to privacy, it seems to me there should be some limits. And because there are unfortunately those who feel there are none, I suppose legal limitations are necessary.
i also have to see how this will impact a couple of my current projects. one of them is inspired by my hero sherry levine--i will be taking photographs of photographs of homeless people that were originally taken by college students, and putting them in larger and more expensive frames.
the other one i call "the homeless re-photographic survey." i'm going to the original scenes of the most famous photographs of homeless people, and i'm going to photograph whoever happens to be standing there now.
Actually I just bought a Burak from Pakistan off eBay for a little photo project. It is pretty wild to think that millions of women have to wear these things... still it is interesting to try it on. But my size 17 feet sticking out tend to give me away.
what if the photographer is homeless too? there will be more of us, so it's going to be an issue.
Uh-oh, I can already hear "hey, buddy, can you spare a roll of pan-f?"...
I just feel terrible. After reading the piece, I realized that I've been holding in my guilt for over 20 years. No longer. I am admitting to all, in my youth I photographed (repeatedly) a homeless man named Frank. Frank hung out near the Pike Place Market (that was before all the Yuppies took over the street corners with their steaming $3.00 lattes). He was not a drunk. His addiction was off-track betting, and playing the horses took all social security check. I gave him stale donuts in exchange of taking (now I realize I was stealing) his images. Admitting this, I've been told, is the first step towards recovery....
I photographed some homeless people in Birmingham, England, for a short piece in a public slide show. But I asked first and offered a little cash as a thank you. With that in mind, most times they were happy to oblige. I thought - at least they could buy themselves a hamburger for it or something. In fact some were even glad to have a bit of attention, while everyone else walked past and ignored them.
I photographed a town crier, during a public performance, in Knaresborough, England; he came over to me and demanded payment as a thanks. Later, I photographed an old gypsy woman in York, England; a tiny gypsy child reached into my pocket and took some money as a thanks.
Just in case someone gets outraged, that was a joke.
Now seriuosly:
matthew: the thing I find worrying about all of this , and the recent motion with regards to branded buildings with defamatory information within the same image. Is that they are all stopping your ability to question , it seems we are being led into a position where we can only show the world as a glamorous place.
There was a guy in the Soviet Union once upon a time who was charged with organizing siteseeing during Stalin's train trips through the country, or so the story goes. Now, tovarisch Stalin wanted to see only nice things, a living proof of Communism's superiority, but the problem was that most if not all of the villages along the route were in total disrepair. Seeing those villages like that would make the Leader very unhappy.
The real problem was that when Stalin was unhappy, those who made him feel like that ended up backing into the wall and posing for celebratory gunfire or, at the very least, won a retirement in Siberia.
So what was the unlucky fellow to do? Well, since the train would never really stop, he decided to erect nice, shiny fronts for all the shacks along the tracks, so looking from a moving train, everything would look like a fairytail. The project was a total success and provided tales of glorious supremacy of the dictatorship of the proletariat, led by the Communist Party with Comrade Stalin at the forefront and heading into the radiant future...
Or some rubbish like that, we all know how it ended. But that's not the point.
The point is that our fellow succeded (and survived in the process). His name was Potemkin and his problem solving method became known as "Potemkin Villages".
Now, I don't know how much of it is truth and how much a legend, but the expression, and the idea, persists. The solution to polution could be to a) reduce the polutants or b) relax the standards. Same with cholesterol, DUI or homelessness. It is only natural that science community always comes on the side of a) and the business tends to adopt b.
The real problem seems to be that the government is usually made of politicians, politicians love money and business by its nature always has more money than the scientists to throw at them.
So, in a nutshell, criminalizing taking pictures of homeless will only harm the homeless because it would put them out of sight and by extension out of mind. I would not be surprised to see a ban on articles about homeless to follow a ban on pictures. Now, that would really make the problem go away, wouldn't it?
Hey Marco. Great story. Mosty true, except the Potemkin village was for Catherine the Great, not Stalin.
http://www.bartleby.com/61/0/P0480000.html
Cheers,
Now if we could just hide them from sight . . .
Maybe we can ban photographing ugly people too . . . and hide them from sight too, even if it means never leaving my apartment.
In addition to the homeless and slot canyons, let's add calla lilies, the California coast from San Fran to 30 miles south of Big Sur, adobe churches . . .
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