on knowing photographers, or how the whole internet might see your kitchen naked
catvalente wrote some time ago about the dangers of being involved with a writer, that they will take bits of you, and bits of your life, maybe mix and match them just enough to obscure what parts are whose, then hang them up for the whole world to see. She wrote this, I believe, while working on Deathless, which may be my favourite novel ever simply for
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Well, yes, in the simple case. Complex cases come in the form of sharing indirect information, the amount personal knowledge required for an audience to make correct logical leaps and the rights of a bystander.
In the simplest case, the vast majority of my portraiture is done at Burning Man-inspired events, where there is a very simple well-known script for photographic consent AND a culture that deeply supports it (especially near DC, where there are many participants with sensitive careers in government). There are also folks with whom I have a long-standing agreement of, literally, shoot first and ask questions later: for example, I shoot podisodd constantly because he's great NON-photogenic practice, and he reviews every raw and processed shot of hiself and indicates the level of sharing with which he is comfortable. From this there exist many facebook or livejournal-scrapbook filtered shots from various events (some embarrassing, none legally incriminating), and a CD containing a decade of private event pictures with a faerie-honor no-copy-even-to-your-hard-drive EULA physically attached, which I've given only to people who were there AND understand what all that means.
But at the extreme of consent and review, one gets into cases where a bystander is uncomfortable with the dissemination of information that it would take personal knowledge and direct questioning to associate them with. In real-life recent examples, a hiking partner and I have both been wary of sharing an EXIF location-cleared photograph of edible wild mushrooms in a public park (I did post it, because there is a cultural tradition among such hunters of refusing locational queries.); I've had a partner be wary of my sharing latte' pour art in a nondescript mug from an untagged location, because they as an assumed companion on my outing felt uncomfortable about the possibility they might be asked about it, and have to verbally share information about where they were, lie, direct them to me, or refuse; I've been asked to delay sharing photographs of art installations from public festivals and text reviews of events until after the opportunity has passed for anyone to interrupt.
The first I find reasonable. The second I find a violation of my own rights for the sake of someone not wanting to be rude. The third I find reasonable in theory but is occasionally a Benny Hill runaround in practice, and unfortunately contributes to much never-finished art due to lost momentum. The third means (again, from real-life examples) that if I have cooked in someone's kitchen and stared out their balcony over a particularly gorgeous view, eventually if I find the momentum later there are going to be food-blog posts with how-to steps involving their pots and pans and an empty landscape shot from some season or year it isn't anymore.
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