Today’s scheduled blog post appeared on Twitter as follows:
I like photographing my fellow subway riders. It helps me see their humanity. http://t.co/8fj3udPzaP
— W. Lotus (@wlotus) February 1, 2015
The timing was ironic, since last night I found myself mulling over the ideas of privacy and respect while riding the subway home.
We boarded a nearly-empty subway car on 67th St. in Queens and discovered three homeless people in the car: one on one end and two on the opposite end. They were all wrapped up in blankets and coats against the cold and appeared to be sleeping. (It was after 1am.) My camera with 50mm lens was slung around my neck as it had been for most of the evening. The street photographer/photojournalist in me immediately began considering ways to compose a shot of them and wondered if it would be all right to move from the middle of the car just long enough to get good closeup shots. The humanitarian in me wouldn’t let me do it.
When we are in public we have no reasonable expectation of privacy. As a photographer that means I have the right to photograph anyone I want and even sell those photos without the person’s permission, so long as I am not using their likeness in a commercial way (as part of an ad campaign, for instance). As a courtesy I could delete the photo, if someone complains about me photographing them, but I am not legally obligated to do so. Understanding that has helped me be bolder about doing street photography. Other than normal shyness I have no problem photographing my fellow New Yorkers on the street, on the bus, and on the train. But I generally draw the line at photographing homeless people.
As a fact of their daily existence homeless people have no privacy, because they have no home. If they live or sleep in a homeless shelter they have almost as little privacy as they have sleeping on the street. When I think of people having no reasonable expectation of privacy I think of people like me who have a home of some kind to go to where the prying eyes of the rest of the world ought not penetrate. But where is the line of respect for those who have no home at all? Does that mean they have no reasonable expectation of privacy anywhere? And if I think that of these vulnerable people, what does that say about me and my ideas of class?
I have photographed homeless people on the subway once or twice. None of those times required that I walk over to them as though I was viewing a public exhibit in a museum or zoo. In those cases they happened to be where I was, right in my line of vision, so I photographed them. But even on the street I avoid photographing homeless people. They are not exhibits placed there for my (barely) middle-class consumption. They are humans trying to survive. Unless my photographing them was for a project I was doing to help raise awareness of their situation, I can’t justify it.