It's a situation every street photographer (and some others) will encounter at some point: you'll take a picture of someone, they'll see you do it, and they'll ask (or demand) that you delete it. Would you delete the picture?
Coming to you from Weekly Imogen, this interesting video tells the story of a street photographer who was pushed into deleting a photo despite there being no legal standing to force him to do so. In the U.S., the general law is that if someone is in a public place with no reasonable expectation of privacy, taking pictures of them is fair game. Of course, what's legal, what's right, and what's smart don't always intersect all at the same place. Personally, unless I just snapped something that's Pulitzer-worthy, I don't think a photo is worth a confrontation, and besides, I try to empathize with the simple fact that a lot of people are not as comfortable with cameras as we are, and I don't think having the law on my side automatically entitles me to make someone feel uncomfortable, at least not from a moral perspective. What're your thoughts? I'm interested to hear them in the comments.
Sometimes it happened to me, while I was taking pictures of street, that someone asked me, even in an energetic way, to delete a photo just taken.
I remember to have deleted a photo only on a specific occasion, after I had been asked, I realized that the person I had photographed had some physical problem, which is why I did not think twice and I deleted the photo. But on all other occasions when I was asked to cancel a photograph, I managed to convince the subject, photographed in the opposite way, in a joking way. This must be the skill of a streetphotographer, knowing how to interact with the subject photographed in order to mitigate the clash and convince him that there is nothing wrong. However, I can almost always be invisible, even if I shoot with a 28 mm and therefore I approach very much to the scene and to the subject to be photographed.
Even in Italy the law, in general, establishes that if someone is in a public place, without perticular expectations of privacy, one can photograph it. The important thing is that the use of photographs is not cheap to advertise or other. The photos must always be taken for study reasons or for non-profit-making photographic projects.
Photographing in public is a legal act, but it is right, to have much common sense and anyway, as Imogen says, unless the shot is worthy of a Pulitzer, it is not worth arguing to hold a street photograph.
It’s sort of strange that this is still an issue, given that pretty much everyone has a camera in their pocket and is snapping away on city streets. This includes people as their subjects.
I'd show them the shot, say how much I like it, no bad intentions meant. If they still wanted it deleted, I'd do so. There's plenty more on the street to shoot.
For me it depends. I was in the Addis Ababa airport killing time and taking some pics last year. I took a wide shot that included a little bit of the multi-layered security and immediately had a hand on my shoulder and had two guys making it clear that wasn't allowed and they wanted to see my pics. I didn't feel like I had any choice but to show them and they had me delete a couple (all conveyed with gestures). But if someone wanted me to delete a photo of a public place that I wanted to keep, I might resist. Fortunately for me I shoot mostly landscapes and they never seem to mind. :)
how they asked would dictate how I react, I can be extremely antagonistic if I feel like it, but generally i'd delete, even if the photo is killer i'd not publish it if they'd spoke to me on a professional assignment, but I might not want to delete it and give them the satisfaction of feeling like they'd won if they were an asshole about it
I had a man ask me to delete the picture. It was a test shot that I wasn't going to use anyhow, but he scared me. Even if I had wanted to use the shot I would have deleted it. In the area where I live there are a lot of immigrants from Russia, and their experience with surveillance makes them really leery of photographers.
I just ask first. Or, if I think asking first would ruin the spontaneity of the image, I would snap it then show it to them. As the guy said, "Life's too short".