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. This page contains links to those already available here at the blog. I have listed them in reverse chronological order, based on their original dates of publication (not in most cases the dates on which they first appeared at this blog).
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- “Private Lives in Public Places, 1” (November 30, 2020): Part 1 of my first substantial consideration of the issue of subjects’ rights in photography. Originally published in the Journal of Mass Media Ethics, Vol. 2, no. 2, March 1987.
- “Privacy in the Public Eye” (August 2000): This concluded those considerations of photographers’ intrusions into the lives of their subjects. Originally in print in the Star-Reporter, then online here at the Café in the “Island Journal” feature, finally here at this blog on September 6rd, 2017.
- “Public Tolerance and the Picture Press” (August 2000): This continued the ruminations on the deaths of both Princess Diana and J.F.K. Jr., and the relationship of press photography to both. Originally in print in the Star-Reporter, then online here at the Café in the “Island Journal” feature, finally here at this blog on September 3rd, 2017.
- “Golden Boy as Camera Fodder” (November 1999): Reminded by a mid-2013 news story that we’d reached the 14th anniversary of the death of John F. Kennedy, Jr., I recalled that I’d written something about it at the time, which I published in November 1999 in a bi-weekly column I then ran in a local giveaway newspaper, the Star-Reporter chain, which had a circulation of about 60,000 here on Staten Island. Subsequently I put it online in a section of The Nearby Café devoted to life here in “the forgotten borough.” On the assumption that few readers of this blog ever drilled down into that archive, I republished it here, with a few minor revisions, on July 16th, 2013, under the heading “14 Years On: R.I.P., J.F.K., Jr.”
- “Why I’m Saying No To This New Arbus Book” (October 2, 1995): In the fall of 1995 I received a review copy of a new Diane Arbus monograph, Untitled. Planning to review it, I sought answers to several legal and structural questions its production and publication raised. The consistent responses I received from those committed to protecting the developmentally disabled perturbed me. I didn’t feel capable, in good conscience, of writing about its content, so I chose instead to write about that situation. I hoped that this would focus attention on the issues raised by the publishing project, and provoke serious discussion of the legal, ethical, and editorial/curatorial issues at stake. I offered it here on October 2, 2015, the twentieth anniversary of its appearance in the New York Observer.
