Critical Tits and Photography

[errantember]

There's been a great debate over photography at the annual Critical Tits bike ride at Burning Man. For the uninitiated, hundreds if not thousands of women go topless, many get body painted, and then they ride across the playa in a huge solidarity parade. Naturally lots of men with cameras show up, despite the fact that BM has rules against taking recognizable pictures of people without their consent. Of course, not all the pictures are recognizable. My comments are on page 8, posted as errantember.

I need a photography icon...

Comments

Re: Interesting topic

[errantember.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the info, it's good to get input from professionals. I'm fairly familiar with photographic law, and I understand the value of having releases in court. If I ever do for-profit work, I definitely intend to use them. For BM stuff, most of my pictures aren't of recognizable people, and when they are, they are people from whom I've gotten at least verbal permission. I'm willing to take the risk of posting those pictures in a non-commercial way with the understanding that I'm happy to take them down if anyone objects. I realize this exposes me to certain kinds of liability, but getting releases is genuinely too much work most of the time, especially because I tend to do candid photography. I'm simply not willing to except the limits that written permission implies, at least in public where First Amendment protections are pretty strong. Burning Man is a little different, so there I at least ask if I'm intending to post it. I also realize that using someone's likeness without their permission is illegal, so I don't do that, either. For me the main dividing line is recognizable pictures, especially when used for profit.
I'd actually like to take a model photography class so I could get more into the deliberate-setup instead of the spontaneous ambient-light style of photography, and obviously for that getting releases is fairly straightforward.