We started at the Grand Arche, in the business district La Defense. This arch, a counterweight to the Arc de Triomphe, is a spectacular design built in 1989 for the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution. With a bit of a stretch, it does look like a giant guillotine, with a basket in place to catch heads rolling.

The Arche provides a platform from which you can see the Arc de Triomphe, which is about a mile or so distant.

In the distance – very, very tiny – is the Arc de Triomphe - well, the 12 – 24mm Nikon lens does have an impact. Fortunately the rain cleared.

Bystanders on the Esplanade du Charles De Gaulle). Yes, the rain cleared and the sun peeked out, fortunately.

However, the sunshine provided its own set of challenges; the contrast was often a little more than the digital framework can handle.

These photographs illustrate a stock problem and also show a possible answer. Photographs need to contain people, at least for most stock purposes. When you include people in your images, you need a signed release for each recognizable person – now count the people in the images above – what, one hundred? Two hundred? Imagine running around La Defense with a couple of hundred release forms, trying to explain in faltering French what you need and why. So the technique employed here – more or less successfully – is to make sure the people who are close enough to be recognizable are all facing away from the camera. It takes perseverance, patience and a little bit of luck, to achieve. (I am ignoring property release issues for this article.)

Now if you want to explore the legal aspects of releases, you should confer with your attorney (or solicitor or lawyer). Generally, if a person is recognizable in a photograph that you are using commercially, you need a release signed by the person. No release generally means no sale. And no sale is the opposite of what we want.

There are four issues to consider – where did you take the photograph, is the subject recognizable, what is the purpose (e.g., commercial use), and was there proper consideration (talk with your lawyer about that one). So if you hid a camera in a place where the subject had a reasonable expectation of privacy and you are now selling the image for use in a major advertising campaign – you have real problems! Intruding into someone’s seclusion, invading their privacy and commercial gain are all relevant factors in determining whether that person has a right to sue the socks off you. (If you want to dig further into the various aspects, have a look at http://www.kantor.com/useful/Legal-Rights-of-Photographers.pdf and http://www.baja.com/sensuousline/sline0799/mag4-6model_releases.shtml - I have no connection with either site.)

As I indicated above, the photographs accompanying the first part of this article include people who arguably are not identifiable, and who are in a public place. Not much at issue perhaps. But it does raise a philosophical question. At what point do these photographs represent invasion of privacy? If I take a photograph of someone on a mountain, a mile or more away, with a 50 mm lens, the subject is definitely not recognizable and does not know that the photograph has been taken. If I move closer and swap the lens for a Nikon 500 mm, the person will start to take shape in the image, and may realize that a photograph has been taken. And if I move to fifteen yards and, again using the 500 mm lens, take a frontal photograph, the person will be definitely recognizable. 

At what point does my action become an invasion of privacy?  What if the person did not see me at all? What if there was a large tourist group standing beside me, all taking video and still images? What if the person had his (or her) head down, concentrating on the slippery slopes? Does the invasion occur only when I try to market that image? Or when I, as a stock photographer, took the photograph?
Street photography depends upon the candid, (mainly) unposed photograph – have a look at Henri Cartier-Bresson’s images the next time you see his work on display. OK, some of them were posed, some obviously had the co-operation of the subjects, but a large number were taken without the subject’s knowledge. And releases were events that happened when prisoners were freed from prisoner of war camps.

Are we headed in the right direction? Do we need all these releases? Or should we use paid models and pose all our stock photographs? Undoubtedly, if you want to market your images through the big agencies, they will request a signed release. Although paradoxically, when you search their web sites, you will find images on display, annotated ‘No Release Available’.

In current times, if you want to sell your images, you will need to include a release. Otherwise your images will stay on the hard drive, gathering dust.
Perhaps it is time to stay with still life, after all.



Copyright © 2006 John Hindmarsh [Contact ] [Bio]