It's a public affair

Our combined efforts are starting to show. The rooms are starting to echo. It's very liberating to pare everything down to the basics. Now, onto something entirely different...

I haven't written about every detail, but the project I left ILM to pursue - the long-mentioned photography project - has been a feature of my daily life for the last six months. I set out to exhibit my photographs by the end of the year, something I didn't actually manage to do. Like a lot of things, it sounded relatively straightforward, but actually doing it has meant facing all the things I don't know how to do, learning what I needed to, and moving forward.

As I was building a portfolio from all the pictures I've taken in the last ten years or so, there were photos of people both known, friends and relatives, and unknown, people in the street. I wasn't sure of the legalities of exhibiting photographs with people in them, much less going about selling them. I would cross those bridges as I came to them. One of the selected photos was of a friend from a few years back. Several months ago I sent her the image in an email, told her I was thinking of using it in my portfolio, perhaps in some exhibition, I wasn't sure. She knew me when I had the first stirrings of my ambition and had always been supportive. She send back an email, making positive noises.

I published the portfolio online, put up some pictures at a party, but otherwise have not yet publicised it because there are still a couple of pieces that need to fall into place, and the move has pushed them down the list.

Then, I received an email from my friend. She'd casually been checking out my pictures, and received the 'nasty surprise' of finding her photograph amongst them. Saying I had misled her and hidden my intention for the photograph from her, she said she and her family were distressed to find her image in public for all to see. My first reaction was the stomach flipping, 'what have I done?' feeling when you upset a friend, and want to make it right as quickly as possible. I deleted the photo completely, sent an instant email back, and soon received a reply thanking me and saying that the issue was settled.

I wish it were settled for me. My instincts to preserve my friendship were good, even if the way she told me was more strident than it needed to be, but it brought home the issue of - what are my obligations to myself as an artist, regardless of my responsibilities as a friend, and where does the law stand on it? I quickly did the research that I had neglected to do earlier. Ideally, you're above board both ethically (never taking or exhibiting a photograph without permission) and legally (having everyone in the photograph sign a release that you can use, exhibit and sell their image as you wish). There are some exceptions, for the case of journalism or news, and in my case, if I simply exhibit the photos as art (without selling them), I am under no legal obligation to obtain consent from the people represented in them.

What if this photo of my friend had been the centerpiece of my portfolio, or of an exhibition? I would have been under no obligation to inform her of what I was doing, but would I have been willing to give up the friendship for the sake of preserving the work? Clearly my first instinct was to choose the friendship over the work, but I wonder if that will always be so, and if that's really such a bad thing. What has remained with me since I deleted the photo was not that I had upset my friend, but that in removing the picture I compromised something small but significant about my work, and I didn't like the feeling. You don't have to be an arsehole to be an artist, but it seems to help!

The other question that it raised was the notion of privacy in today's online world. I put just about all my photos on flickr, I write this blog, you can piece together a lot of information about me based on what is out there. In terms of net traffic, I would get more people to see my photos if I opened the front door of my house and invited everyone who passed to come in and see them. I am not even a blip on the radar, and I am trying to reach more viewers, not hide away. I keep enough to myself that I do not feel that my entire life is public, or that I am compromising my privacy. And where my photography is concerned, the private is public. I don't want, however, to assume that what I am comfortable with is the same as anyone else.

I know people who have been turned down for jobs based on what they wrote on their personal blog. My friends are not comfortable publishing photographs of their children on publicly available websites. People's youthful indiscretions are available on YouTube, and there are services that trawl the net removing such material before it falls on the eyes of a Google-ing potential employer. In today's world, to assume that a photograph taken of you by a friend or stranger will NOT find its way onto the web somewhere is naive at best, although as I said I am not about to deny anyone their right to privacy.

I Googled my friend who was upset about the photograph, and obtained all manner of public information about her. Her employer, her work position and responsibilities, even documents showing likely sensitive private information. I wonder if she's aware that it's out there, and would she demand the same of them that she did of me?

Photo | Privacy | Flickr | Google | YouTube