It is the monetization of our life, not (only) the obsession with “privacy” that kills street photography

The assignment to perform a report on the 4th of July celebrations – L’independence day – in Boston, one of the symbolic places in North American history, gave me the opportunity to reflect on the breakdowns and the now permanent damage caused to “street” photojournalism by the “privacy” hysteria and the unscrupulous exploitation of individual data by of BigTech in the name of the principle “better to apologize than allowed”.

As the rule dictates, while waiting for the real celebrations, I started studying the places, experimenting with the sensations they convey and trying to translate them into images to understand how the city can “speak” to its temporary visitor.

During these explorations, a bit of everything happened, from the possibility of portraying first generation compatriots (happy, however, to be photographed) enjoying the afternoon sun sitting in front of a barber shop in the North End (Little Italy of Boston), at the risk of a “handy” degeneration of the conversation with a “valet” of a shop, resulting from having photographed “without permission” his Harley-Davidson parked on the street and ended instead with a friendly handshake.

Between the two extremes, the perplexed (and sometimes suspicious) looks of people attracted by the presence of a camera, but completely indifferent to the myriad of smartphones who, at the same time, were filming practically anything and anyone, as if it was the vehicle that was worrying (the camera) and not the action (the photograph).

The red thread that links these experiences is the almost superstitious distrust of the “still image”not different from that of Native Americans convinced that photography would have deprived them of the soul, but today instead based on much less “spiritual” reasons.

The annoyance of being photographed, in fact, seems rather connected on the one hand to the (legally wrong) belief that there is a “public privacy” and, on the other, to less unfounded perception of the unacceptability of someone being able to “make money” on their image without sharing the profit. Is this going to be published? – will the photo be published? – is the question I’ve been asked most frequently.

From the first point of view, it is quite easy to demonstrate the non-existence of “public privacy” – just read the sentence 47165/2010 of the Court of Cassation and, as regards the protection of personal data, the press release of the Guarantor which dates back to 2004 – and therefore to conclude that, respecting the dignity of the person and his will not to be portrayed in case he asks not to be, there are no impediments to street-photography. The legal protection of the personal image is associated with the Civil Code and with the part of the copyright law that governs the portrait. The photograph must not harm the dignity of the person, the photographer is the owner of the image taken and if the shot takes place outdoors and documents public events, the authorization of anyone is not necessary. All this, on the assumption that the photographer “puts his own”, i.e. interprets the phenomenal reality through the particular lens of his own experience and sensitivity, otherwise, by law, photography has no substantial protection. Therefore, the photograph taken in compliance with the regulatory limits can also be freely published, but this does not mean that, at least legally, it can be freely reused by third parties.

More complex, however, is the reasoning relating to the economic exploitation of the photographs but above all of the data that can be extracted from them.

In other words, it is not those who publish an image that violate the law, but those who reuse it illegallywhich brings us directly to the subject of wild exploitation of the contents published online.

This topic begins to spread in the times of search engines that have built their success on the ability to access freely and for free the contents disseminated on the net, it has become “endemised” due to theanesthetization induced in people by addiction to social networks and the systematic appropriation by traditional media of online contents “because they are free anyway”, and is back in the news with the controversy triggered by the “discovery” that, for work, some AIs have been built using once again the data disseminated by people, but without paying them any consideration.

With all due respect to artists and image professionals, for those who have made data collection and analysis their own core business it doesn’t necessarily matter if the shot qualifies as a “simple photograph” or as a “creative act” because what matters is whether and how much (meta)data it allows to extract.

Composition, attention to the lights, capture of the “decisive moment”… all this becomes irrelevant if even a hodgepodge of subjects shot in a pedestrian way with a smartphone “that competes with reflex cameras” allows you to identify (automatically or with the help of “tag”) individuals, places and, therefore, relationships, which go to swell (a)x the corpulent profile of each of us, locked up and replicated in infinite databases with access restricted to a few and forbidden to most. A similar discourse concerns the reproduction of the “style” by an AI because even in the case of the “copy” of what makes an artist unique, we are always talking about collecting and analyzing data.

Therefore, in summary, thanks to the analysis of enormous quantities of information extracted from the most diverse sources, profiling professionals also make money on the data extracted from images to build informational clones of people and those of AI also earn on the industrialization of style and individual sensitivity of each one, transforming the creative act into a “shelf product”, infinitely replicable in as many, infinite, variations.

It is not immediate to perceive how this reasoning is connected to street photography, but in reality the link is evident.

There Street photography is an indispensable tool for memory preservation and for documenting the enormous diversity of human social phenomena. It matters little whether it is practiced by famous masters of the camera or, as in the case of Vivian Meyer, by perfect strangers in life who ascend to the Olympus of the greats only after-effects.

However, this fundamental role is not perceived (and it is not sufficient to protect it) by those who are prey to a hysterical vision of privacy, amplified by those who have led people to believe that everything about one’s self is for sale, by organs to data.

Consequently, despite the great statements of principle on “fundamental rights”, the complaints about the “violation of privacy” and the abuse of one’s data often translate, in the end, into a simple and vulgar monetization of rights: yes , privacy is fine but, paying of course, everything is sold and everything is bought.

If, therefore, street-photography ceases to exist, and if we consequently lose the possibility of knowing our history through the reading that professional reporters and thousands of “amateur” photographers around the world make of it, it will not (only) be for the abstruse interpretations of the concept of “private life” proposed by short-sighted regulators and uncritically repeated by experts of dubious competence. We will rather have to thank our individual selfishness which, through narrow-mindedness or ignorance, has led us to put a price on anything, including ourselves, hoping someone will buy us (even in pieces) instead of taking everything and running away without paying the bill.