Street photography has had a long history of capturing some of the most memorable scenes of our lifetimes. Tank Man in Tiananmen Square, the Kent State Pietà, and hundreds of beautifully rendered decisive-moment photographs that I’ve seen and marveled at. Often the law is on the side of the photographer. People are in public spaces and that makes them fair subjects for a photographer’s roaming lens. However, just because it is legal doesn’t make it ethical. Is it ethically reasonable to take someone’s likeness and use it to promote yourself, your work, potentially for financial gain?
Street photography should not be presumed ethical merely because the subject was in public. The ethical burden falls on the photographer to justify the use of another person’s likeness, especially when the image is being used for artistic identity, promotion, publication, or profit.
I have taken some street photos in my time and each time I have to question my own ethics when it comes to releasing photographs to the public. In this age of social-media distribution a person’s likeness can travel to millions of devices around the globe. Are we all right with this as photographers and viewers? These are not trivial questions and they deserve to be taken seriously.
If the defense of street photography is that photographers are documenting public life, then what happens when the photographer repeatedly selects only one narrow demographic from that public life? At that point, are we still documenting the street, or are we documenting the photographer’s own preferences?
When does the photographer’s right to interrogate public life through the lens stop being observation and become selective fixation?
Recently I came across an account where the person justified taking street photos of primarily young, attractive women. If the argument for street photography is that we as photographers are documenting life, then why is it acceptable to take only a narrow slice of that public life and focus primarily on young, attractive women?
I find that using covert techniques to repeatedly target a very narrow segment of the population becomes something different from the usual defense of street photography. It is no longer simply an attempt to observe public life. It has become its own activity, one built around selective fixation. That activity may be legal. Viewers may even approve of the resulting photographs. But neither legality nor approval resolves the ethical problem at its foundation: strangers are being secretly selected and turned into material for the photographer’s own purposes precisely because they belong to a category the photographer prefers.
As viewers, photographers, and people who may themselves become subjects of someone else’s lens, I think we can do better.
For my part, I will continue to interrogate my own work in this way.
Thanks for considering this. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on the subject.
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