street photography is exactly what it sounds like taking portraits of people on the street. here is an example.
Ethically there is some debate in the artistic community as to wether if some one asks you not to take their portrait you are obliged to delete it. common courtesy would dictate that you should delete the picture out of respect for your subjects wishes. However because art is protected under the law and if the work is culturally valuable many photographers feel they do not need to follow common courtesy. Recently I read this article. while this article argued the same points I just made it did make me think. one of the key points of the article is educating the public about what you are doing. several years ago I took a photo of two homeless men smoking something (i think it was crack) in a park in new york. they freaked out and left (I think they thought I was a cop or something) now I wish I had approached them and told them what I was doing instead of freaking them out.
As far as our class is concerned how does this factor legally into the ownership of the portrait. Lets assume that a photographer has taken your picture without your knowledge and you only find out about it several months after the fact when you see the picture online and the photographer has made a load of money. Technically the photographer owns the rights to the image and is completely in the clear legally. However does this not feel like a violation of copyright law? If you as a person can’t claim the right to your own image that seems to be a HUGE flaw in the copyright laws of the art world.
I have actually thought about this a lot about this. I had an art teacher that would take a lot of pictures of people on the street. Then people in the art studio would create paintings from these pictures. I always wanted someone from one of the pictures to come and take a class only to find multiple portraits made of themselves.
I would not be okay with someone keeping a portrait of me that I asked be deleted. If for example, I walked into Claire’s art class and saw that someone had a made a painting of it, I don’t think I would be too thrilled that my request wasn’t followed through.
This is an issue of protection of the person vs. protection of the art. Artists would argue that they should be allowed to freely use such images, and that requiring permissions would make creation more difficult. However, I would argue in favor of individual protection. People have the right to how their image is used. After all, in some cases, personal images can be used for the defamation of the person.
Although I don’t necessary agree that artists should keep pictures if subjects don’t want them to, I think artists have an interesting argument. Similar arguments were made by the documentary filmmakers in Professor Sikand’s lecture–that artists (of all sorts) capture our culture today. Without them, we could not go to museums 50, 100, 150 years from now and see our past. These snapshots do add value. The humans of New York might be very different a century from now, but how would the general public be able to view this change without artists?