Of course ...

Apropos my previous remarks, the current setup works out just fine for most working models most of the time. There is a brisk little industry of models taking a fee to model for a photographer who will take some pictures of some degree of merit between negative infinity and excellent. The model gets a few hundred bucks, but no rights to the pictures.

Still, in this case, the point is that it hardly matters who has what rights. These pictures aren't going anywhere anyways. Terrible, excellent, it doesn't matter. The market for pictures of models is not a lucrative one, in general. But one has to ask in this case, why not share rights? It doesn't matter, surely.

It gets tricky when you're photographing people who are not working models, and who you may be photographing in something less than a flattering light. You're taking more and giving less. The pictures still are not going anywhere, but the transaction is balanced far more in the photographer's favor here.

There isn't any money in play at all, but pride, self-respect, dignity are.

Always Get A Model Release

A common thread in the photography community is that one should when photographing people, always get a model release. In the USA the photographer holds most of the important rights to a picture, but the model holds a small, specific, collection of rights unless those rights are given away. Thus, the normal process is to have the model sign those rights away in exchange for either nothing, or something trivial. This is the standard: That the model should not have any rights whatsoever to the picture.

The legal situation is part of the general collection of law surrounding copyright of photographs. Generally speaking, the default is that the photographer gets everything and nobody else gets anything. Since there are a few lacunae in this coverage, it is deemed necessary to fill those in with a model release.

This is, frankly, silly. It's wonderfully convenient for photographers, and since photographers are used to the situation they will of course create furor and outcry at the notion of taking away their undeserved free stuff. Still, this is a massive giveaway to photographers, for no particular reason. As far as I can make out, when copyright was being sorted out there was a notion in play that someone should get all the rights, and the decision mas made -- narrowly -- to make that someone be the photographer. And here we are.

This speaks to the problems of photojournalism.

W. Eugene Smith, certainly one of the luminaries, produced an astonishing photo essay about Minamata. He portrayed the ruined people of Minamata sympathetically, but with a profoundly revealing eye. Neither the viewer nor the subjects were spared much. In this project, he took from, he used, he exploited his subjects. The pictures belonged to Smith, and to nobody else. However, he kept up his end of the photojournalist's bargain by telling the story, telling truth. He did not hold these pictures closely, he spread them for the world to see. In doing so, he literally changed the world with those pictures, to better the lives of the people.

Ultimately, Smith's wife gave up the copyright to the most famous and intimate of those photos to the family of the (now deceased) subject. Smith's wife recognized that, legalities aside, the people in the picture have some moral rights, which ought to be respected. This, even after Smith had kept his side of the bargain of photojournalism. He had, in a sense, bought and paid for the rights according to custom, and still his wife reverted the rights to this picture to the subject.

We operate with a split personality, here. On the one hand, our society continues to hold on to vestigial ideas about the rights of the subject, we hold on to the idea that the photograph takes, that photographers do not get a free ride, do not deserve free rights to everything. If you don't believe me, go take pictures of strangers' kids for a while and see what happens. On the other hand, we simultaneously hold the bizarre notion that the photographer, properly, holds all the rights to every picture taken, regardless of subject, and that the photographer is rightly empowered to do anything whatever with those pictures.

Perhaps one should consider a more generous model release. Some people already use quite generous ones, by current standards.

Fauxtojournalism

Photography is an appropriative act. One takes a photograph. When you press the button, you acquire possession of an object you did not have before, and to which you have no particular rights.

A photojournalist, no less than any other photographer, appropriates. A photojournalist, according to a somewhat labored argument, is taking pictures which reveal Truth and for this reason must remain separate. The photojournalist, in order to avoid disturbing, altering, the Truth, must not be jumping in to assist, must not be paying people to pose, must take care not alter the situation in front of the camera. This is particularly disturbing when the Truth is evidently about human suffering, about disaster, about death.

Of course this is to ignore the bulk of photojournalism, which is mostly "here is the parade", "these two teams are playing a game", "this is the mayor, giving a speech filled with lies" and so on. Let us set this aside, and focus on those scenes of poverty, disaster, suffering.

The photojournalist tries to record unmodified, undisturbed, Truth. Often, the goal is explicitly to generate change. By showing the suffering, the disaster, the journalist seeks to cause the viewer's response: This must change, this must never happen again, this will not stand. Whether or not the goal includes generating change, the goal is always to tell the story: that this happened, that these people lived, suffered, died.

There is a straightforward bargain here. The photojournalist appropriates, takes. The photojournalist remains separate, lending no aid, no succor (this is largely a fiction, but set that aside as well, it is a popular fiction). The photojournalist does these basically unpleasant things so that the Truth may be told, as it was, pristine. That is, in return the photojournalist will tell the Truth, will seek to generate the greater Change, or will at any rate tell the world that this injustice exists, that those suffering suffered. The story will be told, to whatever effect that telling produces.

If you, as a photographer, are not in a position to tell that story to anyone, then you have no business with the first half of the bargain. If you can take an item off the shelf, but cannot pay for it then get out of the store.

This is fauxtojournalism. People with no power to tell the story, to speak Truth widely, have no business wrapping themselves in the mantle of photojournalism. If you're taking pictures of homeless people, but carefully maintaining photojournalistic distance because you, you know, ethics, and then simply dumping the result into your flickr account then, let me be clear:

Fuck You

You're appropriating. You're not helping. You're doing all of the taking side of the equation, and none of the giving side. You're not shopping, you're just shoplifting.

The Photographer is Present

Photojournalism usually asks that we allow the polite fiction that the camera is not present. In this modern era, however, we're less and less willing to accept that polite fiction. Everyone has a camera now, and a surprisingly large number of news photographs are made by "citizen journalists" (i.e. free pictures, from the point of view of the business packaging news for our consumption).

The fact is that the camera has always been there. Ethical standards for photojournalists suggest strongly that the journalist maintain separatation, not taking part in the news, merely recording it as it unfolds. This has always been nonsense, of course. News-makers have always mugged for the camera, performed for the camera, run from the camera. Only with quite a bit of luck and skill has the photojournalist been able to approach the standard of non-involvement. More often, they have been able to create the illusion of non-involvement.

When amateurs get involved it gets worse. They ape the standard, but nobody is even attempting to hold them to it.

I saw recently a series documenting the day of a homeless man, in a photojournalistic style (read: black and white). The series closes with a closeup shot of the subject's face as he tries to sleep, shivering with the cold.

The presence of the camera and the photographer is overwhelming here. We're much too close to believe the fiction of non-involvement. Are we to believe that the photographer is a monster, watching a man freeze from a couple of feet away, and doing nothing? Contrariwise, are we to believe that the scene is staged? Or that the photographer allowed the man to freeze, but only for a little while, and is therefore only an exploiter, not a monster?

What's going on here? The camera implies a photographer. The photographer is present, that is the essence and power of photography.

The photographer is present.

And yet, all too frequently, we are asked to take part in the fiction that the photographer is not, or at any rate might as well not be.

An Interesting Read

James Estrin, co-editor of the NY Times Lens blog, has written an essay for National Geographic. It contains, well, it contains themes, ideas, and even phrases which the readers of this blog right here might find familiar.

I can't quite tell if I am just totally plugged into the zeitgeist here, or if Mr. Estrin reads my blog. Either way, I feel pretty darn validated! He's more upbeat and positive than I am, to be sure, and these things are just ideas not patents. So, if you are reading, Mr. Estrin, and if my writing did inform yours, that's fine with me!

Check it out right here.

The Dishonesty of Straight Photography

Somewhere at the beginning of the 20th century, "straight photography" became the dominant mode of photography. I think it was a backlash and so on, whatever. I don't really care all that much about the history. The point is that for the last 100 years or so the default setting for photography has been: sharp, in focus, exposed to give detail throughout the tonal range. That is, pictures which show us as much as is technically possible about what was actually in front of the camera.

This is not to say that straight photography is all there is or has been. I mean only that other styles are viewed as relative to straight photography. Straight photography is the dominant thing. If you want to be "edgy" or "creative" start doing something else. Further, photojournalism and other reportage genres are all straight.

The trouble is, a straight photograph isn't any more honest than a.. bent one. In fact, it's arguably less honest. By presenting itself sharp and clear, with details in the highlights and the shadows, and with a fleet of social conventions attached, we take a straight photograph as truthful. It is in fact no more truthful than any other photograph. Straight photography methods allow the photographer to paint a veneer of truthiness on anything. A bent photograph might be more honest, more truthful, and more real. What newspaper today would publish a photograph that shows what it felt like to be there over a straight photograph that does nothing of the sort. See also Robert Capa's "Falling Soldier", which would be much lesser as a straight photograph, which might have been staged, but which may be the single greatest photojournalistic shot ever made.

I rather hope that we are on the verge of a new idea of photography, one which finally steps away from straight as the standard. With instagram filters, with easy digital processing, with any number of approaches and idioms in play, one at least can imagine a new generation of society which treats photographs with a skepticism as well as a little more art. One can imagine a future, I suppose, in which the New York Times publishes an honest picture of what it felt like to be there over a dishonestly cropped straight photograph that supports a lie about what it was to be there.

That might be pushing it, though..

Truth and Photojounalism

There's been a few minor scandals lately (and, honestly, there's always been a few lately) about journalistic pictures being faked, or wrong, or accompanied by lies. Recently I ran across a little discussion about a fellow who was photographed with one of his guns in his own garage. He was described in a caption as a former Marine Sniper, living in some seedy district of Rochester, NY.

Turns out most of the caption was wrong, and there are issues with the way the picture was taken and so on and so forth. A lot of irrelevant stuff. The interesting point for me was the suggestion that there may have been a language problem. The photographer is European, and presumably has English as, at best, a second language. The photographer may have mis-remembered some details.

The minutiae don't matter. What does matter here is that part of the problem stems, or appears to have stemmed, from what is really a cultural divide. The cultural divide between Western Europe and Rochester, NY is not very wide, but it's there.

Consider now the problem of western journalists parachuting in to, say, Arab nations and taking some pictures.

In fact, let's consider a hypothetical space alien visiting our planet. In the course of an intensive 8 weeks or so, this alien learns much about humanity, including that the bared-teeth expression with the corners of the mouth curled up, is an expression of amity and happiness. On the last day, this alien takes a snapshot of two boys in the street, smiling at one another, accompanied by hand genstures featuring a raised middle finger. The alien captions this "two male human youths enjoying a pleasant social moment".

A western journalist in Egypt isn't a space alien, but he's probably missing some cultural cues. We, western viewers of that journalist's pictures, are probably missing a lot more of them. Even if the journalist is honestly doing his or her best to accurately and fairly portray some situation, the probability of being able to do this well is very low. When you toss in editors with political agendas, the situation gets worse.

We ascribe too much weight of truth to photographs.

Truth, Photographs, and the Media

I have beaten this little drum before, I think. As of this writing, though, we have yet another scandal about such and such a press photograph was allegedly faked in some as-yet undetermined fashion, etcetera and so forth. So, I feel like it's time for another round.

Photojournalism isn't. This discussion is at least 30 years old, and probably 30 years dead, but nobody seems to remember it. Some photo is shown to be manipulated to a greater or lesser extent. Shock and dismay is registered. The photographer and/or editor are duly pilloried and Media Standards For Photographic Manipulation are dutifully rolled out to remind us that the press adheres to strict rules to guarantee that only True Photographs will be shown to you. The system has worked, Untruth has been stamped out again. Phew!

This is all crap, designed to make the Media look honest, designed to bolster their fantasy of being purveyors of objective truth. It's simply not true.

Photojournalism isn't. It isn't journalism, that is. A photograph can show you What, and maybe hint at How. It leaves out Who, Where, When and the most important one of all, Why. Photos are, by their very definition, a frame around a tiny fraction of what it true at an instant in time, removed from all context and presented to us. Truth, and journalistic Truth in particular, is almost entirely about context. It's about how these things fit into the larger world, it's about why these things are happening.

A photograph feels like Truth, because it is a literal tracing of something that was actually there in front of the camera. In that sense, it is true. Media Standards For Manipulation are all about preserving this trivial and uninteresting truth. Essentially, you can't print a photograph in the press unless the stuff that appears to be in the photo was actually there. So what?

A photograph, by the its power of apparent Truth, is as likely to distort as to reveal. A photograph makes us believe it, so if it is lying to us, that lie has far more power than if someone simply wrote the lie down.

The press loves photographs for their power. Someone writes a piece about something or other, presumably striving to be Truthful. There's still a narrative there, one or more ideas are presented. So-and-so are a bunch of Bad Dudes, or something. Whether it's True or not, whether that even means anything, that's irrelevant to the current discussion. The point is, the photo editor or someone sorts through the available pictures and selects a picture to support the story. They select a picture, perhaps, of one of the so-and-so's, in which it appears that the dude is in fact being a Bad Dude. We read the story, or at least the first bit. We learn that we're supposed to think so-and-so are a bunch of Bad Dudes and, my goodness, here is proof! The newspaper has guaranteed us that this picture is of a genuine so-and-so, and that he is indeed Being A Bad Dude. The backs up the text, and gives us a much stronger impression that so-and-so are in fact a bunch of Bad Dudes. This despite the fact that the picture shows us one (1) so-and-so out of perhaps millions, in one instant of time, apparently being a Bad Dude. The photograph is not meaningful supporting evidence at all, but it certainly acts upon us as if it were.

You can lie with a crop just as easily as with an erasure. You can lie by choosing to run this photograph instead of that photograph as easily as with a crop.