Week #5 UOP – Privacy/Ethics
This week has centred around the notion of privacy and the social practice of photography, more particularly ethics and street photography.
Daniel Palmer’s take on Mobile Photography discussed the seemingly ever-present camera phone and naturally the proliferation of photos taken on camera phones. “No phone is complete today without a camera, the quality of which has continued to improve sales of traditional cameras have simultaneously shrunk.”
Palmer invites us to think about how “camera phones represent something new in the history of photography, because they are capable not only of recording and displaying images but also instantly sharing them, via the internet or messaging services.
The camera phone experience is one highly evolved and Palmer suggests it challenges photography’s original purpose: “From being exclusively concerned with representation to photographs as machine-readable data”.
Palmer recognises “camera phones are pioneering a less visible shift towards computational photography, in which cameras are increasingly able to recognise and interpret scenes, of the increasing importance of metadata, and towards images that are able to perform actions rather than simply represent the world.”
Complementing the discussion of such technology, ethical concerns emerge in Jessica Lake’s article on The Conversation: Is it OK for people to take pictures of you in public and publish them? Currently in Australia there is no law against non-consensual photography.
In Friday’s class we debated the topic, the pro-street photography being the winners. I’m on the fence in this debate, maybe a little more on the pro side. I think asking for consent after is a great method to capture candid shots ethically.
We were then encouraged to venture out of uni environment and ask strangers to take their portrait. I found the experience quite thrilling but I was also too self-concisous. Once I relaxed a little it was rewarding but it certainly took some time. My shots would not be considered street photography – most were awkward half smiles and unnatural stances. However I still found it a valuable lesson plucking up the courage to ask. I got rejections too, which I didn’t take personally, if I were in their shoes I’d probably refuse too, or would agree due to guilt but would still feel weird.
On Tuesday the interesting documentary on Vivian Maier was shown. I really enjoyed the feminist perspective by Rose Lichter-Marck – The New Yorker: Vivian Maier and the Problem of Difficult Women. She observed that over history “the unconventional choices of women are explained in the language of mental illness, trauma, or sexual repression, as symptoms of pathology rather than as an active response to structural challenges or mere preference.” Women’s choices were/are simplified as “problems that need solving”.
“To suggest that her choices were the result of some as yet uncovered emotional trauma is to assume that her life was lived in reaction to pain. But this shoehorns her into the very conventions of capitalism and bourgeois values that she eschewed so aggressively. She valued her freedom above all. Her art and profession have more in common than it may initially seem. She was a perpetual outsider, and she liked it that way. She moved among people but did not belong to any of them. She was close but not entangled. She could always walk away. In the documentary, when Maloof describes how Maier spent the late fifties and sixties, travelling and photographing the world alone, this did not strike me as the least bit sad. It seemed that, on those trips, Maier was the most free she had ever been, and ever would be. That’s how she wanted to see herself. And she did.”