While writing yesterday’s post on the Folsom Street Fair, I came across this article on the issue of photographing participants in these kind of public events. I though the issues it raised and the article subsequent comments where interesting. The trigger for this was an Ask First campaign that wanted to raise awareness around consent. They used stickers to remind people to ask before touching or engaging with people. They also extended that to photographs. The first part sounds excellent to me, the last part I’m not so sure on.
Shared public spaces are for everyone to use. That means their for the kinky, the non-kinky and the occasionally curious. They shouldn’t be majority ruled or driven to the lowest common denominator of taste. As I’ve argued before, as long as the goal isn’t to piss people off, kinky people should be able to do their thing in public. However, at the same time, when the kinky people become the majority at somewhere like Folsom, they shouldn’t turn around and takes rights off others. It’s the photographers public space as much as theirs, and part of the social contract around public spaces is that you can be identified and photographed in them. That goes for the public, the police and the perverted. If being identified is such a big deal to you then either dress conventionally or wear some sort of mask or hood. You’re in a public space – that has consequences.
Of course if you want to combine photography with privacy, then the best way to go is the selfie. This lady seems to have mastered that pretty well, thanks to the help of a mirror and a handy doormat.
There’s no watermark on this, but my domme sense tells me that’s Empress Jennifer who has filmed for sites such as Men are Slaves and Asian Cruelty.
I agree, if you’re going to play in a public area you have to accept the consequences. These days when virtually everybody carries a phone capable of taking pictures and posting them on the internet there is almost no way of avoiding the pictures becoming public. However as I discovered when I was photographed during a spanking and caning demonstration at an exhibition it’s not necessarily as bad as you might imagine. Although pictures appeared on the net less people saw them than I thought. What we forget is that on the whole these pictures are only going to be viewed by people with similar interests, Unless you are a celebrity or politician people will not pay too much attention.
I think the really tricky issue is going to come when facial recognition and search technology get really good. As you say and found out, for the most part, people aren’t going to be looking through fetish sites unless there already into that. The odds of being spotted by someone who matters are slim. But it’ll be a different story when anyone can type your name into a search engine and it’ll pull up any images that have been posted online of you, even if you’re not mentioned anywhere in the text. Then your boss or parents could easily stumble across something they shouldn’t. But I still don’t think the answer to that is to ban photographs in public spaces.
-paltego