Can the Right to Privacy Become an Obstacle for Artistic Creation?
For frequent viewers of Japanese TV shows, the widespread use of blurring people and whole neighborhoods out can be quite noticeable. When shows take to the streets, interviewing people or following them to their homes and workplaces, everyone and everything that are not the subjects of the shows is pixelated to mask identities. The widespread use of visual disguise is a result of strict Japanese laws on privacy protection, which require that individuals only be displayed after receiving explicit consent from them to do so. For a crowded street, asking the passerby one by one is impracticable, so better blur the whole thing out.
While for most TV viewers, such widespread pixelation is at most a minor annoyance, an idiosyncrasy that one can get accustomed to and accept due to the legitimate concerns of privacy, for artists, such fixation on masking the passerby can have real difficulties for their work. A particular example is that of professional photographers who make a living taking pictures of landscapes, full of people that they cannot hope to ask permission for. Given the artistic merit of capturing the photo of a naturally crowded street, how would concerns about privacy prevent such a picture from being displayed to the general public?
In reality, professional photographers admit that they often exist in a legal grey zone, forced to skip the procedure of asking for permission. The artistic reason for not asking for permissions certainly makes sense: if the permission is asked for, the person being photographed will no longer behave naturally, instead simply pretending to do what they do for the camera. The desire for the photographer to capture the real, unedited lives of the common people is lost when permission is deliberately asked for. For the more law-abiding photographers, they are forced to forego the opportunity to take certain shots.
Older photographers particularly grumble about the rigid concerns about privacy as they remember the decades past when such concerns were not nearly as legally formidable as they are today. Hence they find themselves exhibiting their photos of complete strangers taken in the 1980s and 1990s but spending time assuring their exhibitions' audiences that "back in the day" what is considered more or less illegal was certainly not a big deal. The explanations, of course, comes with a big dollop of nostalgia for the days that they had the freedom to photograph whoever and wherever they wanted.
Yet, it is not only the older photographers that should use their nostalgia for the artistic freedom of the past to mildly criticize how privacy concerns make art so difficult today. Concerns about privacy have put at a disadvantage all artists that use the natural human environment to create their art. Those who create documentaries about the daily lives of strangers, paint them, or even write them into novels and works of nonfiction now find themselves expending ever more effort to blur out any description or physical features that would help the audience identify places and persons associated with their art.
To restrict those who practice their art with the wider world ultimately takes away from the art's effectiveness. Efforts to not fall afoul of the law will force more artists to create art not directly enmeshed with human subjects living naturally but to relegate the creation of art to their little laboratories, where all humans that appear are simulations and imitations of what happens in real life. It is as if medical researchers are only allowed to test their medicine on rats, but not humans. The restrictions of what subject to use greatly take away the effectiveness of the art.
But of course, there is no denying the increasing concerns for privacy in today's world. The advancement of surveillance, facial recognition, and high-definition video and photo technologies creates an environment in which it is getting ever easier for people to have their biometric information exposed to complete strangers simply for being in public places. The linkage of sensitive information like financial accounts and social media to biometric details ensure that people become more and more paranoid about the prospects of leaked personal information being misused.
Hence, there must be a balancing act between the desire of artists to ply their crafts in a natural environment full of strangers, and those strangers' concerns that their faces will start popping up in art exhibitions without unbeknownst to them. Perhaps the answer lies not so much artists' restraint but that of governments and companies that use biometric information. While facial recognition, for instance, can be a source of greater convenience, it creates many opportunities for the unscrupulous to defraud strangers simply by recreating facial features. If policies are enacted to crack down on the use of biometric technologies, then artists would not get so much legal pushback for showing a few strangers' faces in their pictures and videos.
While for most TV viewers, such widespread pixelation is at most a minor annoyance, an idiosyncrasy that one can get accustomed to and accept due to the legitimate concerns of privacy, for artists, such fixation on masking the passerby can have real difficulties for their work. A particular example is that of professional photographers who make a living taking pictures of landscapes, full of people that they cannot hope to ask permission for. Given the artistic merit of capturing the photo of a naturally crowded street, how would concerns about privacy prevent such a picture from being displayed to the general public?
In reality, professional photographers admit that they often exist in a legal grey zone, forced to skip the procedure of asking for permission. The artistic reason for not asking for permissions certainly makes sense: if the permission is asked for, the person being photographed will no longer behave naturally, instead simply pretending to do what they do for the camera. The desire for the photographer to capture the real, unedited lives of the common people is lost when permission is deliberately asked for. For the more law-abiding photographers, they are forced to forego the opportunity to take certain shots.
Older photographers particularly grumble about the rigid concerns about privacy as they remember the decades past when such concerns were not nearly as legally formidable as they are today. Hence they find themselves exhibiting their photos of complete strangers taken in the 1980s and 1990s but spending time assuring their exhibitions' audiences that "back in the day" what is considered more or less illegal was certainly not a big deal. The explanations, of course, comes with a big dollop of nostalgia for the days that they had the freedom to photograph whoever and wherever they wanted.
Yet, it is not only the older photographers that should use their nostalgia for the artistic freedom of the past to mildly criticize how privacy concerns make art so difficult today. Concerns about privacy have put at a disadvantage all artists that use the natural human environment to create their art. Those who create documentaries about the daily lives of strangers, paint them, or even write them into novels and works of nonfiction now find themselves expending ever more effort to blur out any description or physical features that would help the audience identify places and persons associated with their art.
To restrict those who practice their art with the wider world ultimately takes away from the art's effectiveness. Efforts to not fall afoul of the law will force more artists to create art not directly enmeshed with human subjects living naturally but to relegate the creation of art to their little laboratories, where all humans that appear are simulations and imitations of what happens in real life. It is as if medical researchers are only allowed to test their medicine on rats, but not humans. The restrictions of what subject to use greatly take away the effectiveness of the art.
But of course, there is no denying the increasing concerns for privacy in today's world. The advancement of surveillance, facial recognition, and high-definition video and photo technologies creates an environment in which it is getting ever easier for people to have their biometric information exposed to complete strangers simply for being in public places. The linkage of sensitive information like financial accounts and social media to biometric details ensure that people become more and more paranoid about the prospects of leaked personal information being misused.
Hence, there must be a balancing act between the desire of artists to ply their crafts in a natural environment full of strangers, and those strangers' concerns that their faces will start popping up in art exhibitions without unbeknownst to them. Perhaps the answer lies not so much artists' restraint but that of governments and companies that use biometric information. While facial recognition, for instance, can be a source of greater convenience, it creates many opportunities for the unscrupulous to defraud strangers simply by recreating facial features. If policies are enacted to crack down on the use of biometric technologies, then artists would not get so much legal pushback for showing a few strangers' faces in their pictures and videos.
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