Consent is the issue. If the family did not consent to the works or their likeness being used for financial gain, the artwork is unlawful. Plain and simple. They deserve compensation. Furthermore, they were photographed while housed in a private space. If you do not understand this concept, perhaps you can read “For Us, The Living”
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Too bad the legal system disagreed?
Simply put, if I see you through your window and you’ve left it uncovered, you have no reasonable expectation of privacy. Court case after court case has settled this. This is only a more extreme version of this.
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I’m talking about “seeing” so you cite a lawsuit about recording video with audio on private property?
Seems to be the judge was ruling on Slocum being on their property recording. Guess she should have stood out on the sidewalk where it is public property or in her home (theoretically) across the street with a zoom lens. Of course, the standards for recording audio and those for visual mediums are also different since people have a “reasonable expectation” of privacy for speech from a distance generally. Judges and juries also tend to go with precedent and common sense arguments. Me up against your window on your lawn with a smart phone to video you isn’t going to go over well.
Thanks for trying though.
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Nope, Slocum was a tenant legally living in an outbuilding on the same property.
Regardless, fine legalistic hairsplitting between audiovisual recording and still photography aside, I hope you’ll agree that surreptitiously taking pictures of someone in their home without their knowledge (much less consent,) and then exhibiting those photos in public is a shithead move that should not be condoned as ethically or socially acceptable. There’s a big difference between seeing someone and photographing them for public distribution. (I’m very surprised the issue of model release forms didn’t come up. Being visible from a public place isn’t a blanket release when the “model” is the specific subject of the photo, as opposed to a crowd scene.)
The law gets things wrong all the time, and this is a case in point.
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You misunderstand me. I said, consent. Not privacy.
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Thats not the same as feel free to make and distribute photos of us though.
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You are assuming financial gain where there might be none. These are two different issues. What if the pictures don’t sell, or take time to sell? Their visibility is as a result of being on display in the meanwhile. There is no way to require compensation for prospective sales. There might be a case with regards to actual sales, but this doesn’t do anything to limit the exposure.
The wind! The noise! The lack of substance! Classic shaddack.
And it was a really beautiful icon, too. If someone wanted to get all pissy about the piss, they could, but it was a beautiful image.
Now, Serrano probably didn’t intend it that way, I think was was more interested in taking the piss as it were [IIRC], but it was a beautiful religious image nonetheless.
Same with Ofili’s Madonna. I found it ironic that the few times modern artists deal with religious iconography the religious right-wing starts acting like they’ve been given the biggest latin-speaking wedgie ever. I saw that in the Sensation show at the Brooklyn Museum. The show overall was okay; the Ofili piece was good, the Blue Army out front was silly; the Dinos and Jake Chapman piece was awful, IMHO.
Like of this guy?
Rhetorical. The answer is, compensate the family. Their anonymity was not preserved as they have obviously filed suit and have been identified.
Was the artist paid for his work or to produce the works? Compensate the family.
You stated the purpose of offering compensation as being because the work was presumably done for financial gain. So how can whether or not there was financial gain not be a relevant factor?
Umm… that’s what I asked. But the answer to the question is relevant. Because if there was no financial gain, there isn’t anything to compensate them with. It’s not enough for there to be a pretense of eventual profit. Otherwise, isn’t the photographer basically just paying them for being themselves? I have been on television news before, and wasn’t eligible to be paid for it, because it was ostensibly for public edification - even though there was certainly money involved somewhere down the media chain. Pay generally becomes a factor when people are taken out of the context of their daily lives, performing tasks on somebody else’s time which they would not have been doing otherwise. This is why hiring actors or models is different from showing real-life events.
I am not saying that this wasn’t weird and somewhat imposing. But I think it’s less cut-and-dried than you are making of it with this as a remedy.
Here’s the book Arne published and is selling on Amazon. He works out of a Tribeca, NYC apartment. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it once more. Pay the family.
It’d be fine by me if he did. I’m no authoritarian who thinks people need to be controlled.
There’s some interesting [quote=“cryoutlaughin, post:97, topic:55383”]
Was the artist paid for his work or to produce the works? Compensate the family.
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Not legally required, actually. At least, not until you start licensing out the images for commercial use (in ads and such). Displaying (and even selling) prints doesn’t require a release of any kind. Since it seems to have been ruled that there was no “reasonable expectation of privacy” (which is really the key sticking point), these photos are (from a legal perspective) no different from a photographer taking photos of people walking down the street.
Some info on the legalities of street photography from a former-lawyer-turned-photographer as well.
(Note that likeness rights vary from state to state, as well, of course )
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But morally?
I’m pretty sure this guy did nothing illegal. But I still think the whole thing is a dick move. I hope his neighbours now have signs in their windows indicating their opinion of him.
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Filing a lawsuit proves nothing; double-nothing when the lawsuit is about privacy not anonymity; triple-nothing when the lawsuit is tossed-out by the court.
Your link doesn’t suggest that the book is actually selling - merely that it is available for sale. It’s just another medium, and like hanging in a gallery, does not automatically mean that the artist obtains any financial benefit which they are able to pass on to others.
What about for families such as mine who don’t accept money? US courts don’t offer any other form of civil compensation. As someone who is both an artist and avoids money, I don’t find any of this helpful. And it doesn’t address your concerns about the significance of consent. Consent seems like a criminal rather than civil problem, which is why people can’t rape and dodge charges by paying the victim. If they had a legal expectation of giving consent, this would still have been violated.
