When Is A Blog Not A True Diary?
Thursday, April 24, 2014
Sometimes I wonder if I should not pack in
this blog. In the last few months I have been getting repeated requests from my
subjects whose pictures might appear here. They want me to remove them as they
don’t want their clients to see them.
For many years I eschewed model releases
and preferred the route of getting permission from my subjects to display their
pictures in gallery exhibitions and in my portfolio. This worked very well
until I received a scary letter from a lawyer “ignore this at your own peril” telling
me that I could not use any pictures of her client in anything. I am waiting
for senility to then post the “offending” pictures, lawyer be damned.
But a blog is different. And particularly
telling is my blog. Because I have written every day since January 2006, 3060
blogs in all before this one, I have a Blogger Stats page that tells me I
average around 400,000 page reads (peeks, perhaps?) per month. I believe that
these statistics are wonky and that many of the findings are random image
searches. But still.
Because of the high profile of this blog I
have a self-imposed rule that I do not show bits and things when I post what
surely must be a nude.
I understand that in youth a person might
not have cared about images that might reveal a bit too much and years later
after having become a school teacher or lawyer the picture could be a
liability.
But the other side of the coin is that my
blog is a true diary. Would anybody tear out a page from a hard copy diary if
asked? But is a blog really a diary if everybody can read it?
My compromise with those that request I
remove offending pictures is to change their names. Then I check if their name
is embedded in the metadata of the photograph. I remove the photograph, temporarily and
re-name it. In most cases in name searches the images in Google Images will
disappear after a few weeks.
Increasingly as I approach my one-way door exit I believe I am an artist besides being a competent photographer. I believe that many of my photographs are, not artistic, or tasteful, but simply art. I feel hurt when I am asked to withdraw a photograph (I think withdraw is the right verb here). Somehow the picture that offends becomes a trite thing.
Increasingly as I approach my one-way door exit I believe I am an artist besides being a competent photographer. I believe that many of my photographs are, not artistic, or tasteful, but simply art. I feel hurt when I am asked to withdraw a photograph (I think withdraw is the right verb here). Somehow the picture that offends becomes a trite thing.
