How can street photographers sell their work, legally and ethically?

She was doing very much the same thing.
Winogrand was on a grant too.
The photographers circumstances doesn’t make much of a difference.

What’s legal isn’t very important here IMO.
People break the law in small ways all the time like this. And the law on public photography is surprisingly lenient in much of the world. And very hard to actually prosecute anyone. Especially if the image is on film, it’s very easy to get rid off and hard to track if scanned.

Making money off of the image of someone else is legal in most civilized countries, if it was done in a public space, which can be very hard to prove or disprove.

The migrant mother formally said yes and let her take the pictures, which is obviously an approval.
Whether she said they wouldn’t be sold or not is impossible to prove.
You should always assume the possibility is there as an adult.

Money and careers (at least one) was made off that image.
Point is: The law is there to stop petty squabbles like this. As unfair as it might seem to some, Lange was in the right, probably also back then.

Ko.Fe. said:

Amateur in terms of been totally clueless about street photography regulations. You are amateur in this regard by posting speculations and spreading fear in OP. I replied, because I knew more about street photography regulations than you. It just a matter been not so lazy and google about it before posting . This is difference between total amateur and been smart.

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I can't not say anything. What is your point? Do you really know all that much, or do you think you know that much? Are you redefining definition of discussion forums? Is this not a place to ask questions?

Simply put, it appears that according to your perception of smart vs. amateur, you have your own set of some classified rules and others need to think it through really hard, before they inflict injury on your supreme knowledge by asking a question simply seeking an answer to it. You do sound offended, yet figure injecting more poison into this was the right thing to do. Quite amateurish to me. But, I am an amateur, never too smart.

Witold said:

I can't not say anything. What is your point? Do you really know all that much, or do you think you know that much? Are you redefining definition of discussion forums? Is this not a place to ask questions?

Simply put, it appears that according to your perception of smart vs. amateur, you have your own set of some classified rules and others need to think it through really hard, before they inflict injury on your supreme knowledge by asking a question simply seeking an answer to it. You do sound offended, yet figure injecting more poison into this was the right thing to do. Quite amateurish to me. But, I am an amateur, never too smart.

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I”m on streets with cameras for more than decade- I:m recognized, people asked for my prints, I won some contests. I personally know some street photogs with books and exhibitions. Including those in USA, where OP is.
And of course I have studied local regulations. Where i*m it is well defined in government documents. Where are also local cases with street photogs.
Google maps has paid some thousands dollars for boobs been exposed of person just sitting on porch. Young dude was giving ticket by police for been not obeying police order to stop taking pictures and so on. All I did is just googled it to the root document. Fear mongering threads like this comes because OPs are just lazy to google or they need to expose their high morality. Often, higher than official, publicly assessable via internet regulations based on common sense

jtk said:

fwiw the OT has to do with "street photoraphy" and the "ethics" that are purportedly attached to whatever "street" might be.

American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP) provides legal advice. Nobody here does that...online wannabe lawyers don't provide legal advice either, no matter what they quote about local laws.

Lange wasn't a "street photographer" ... she was a GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEE who had a specific kind of assignment. IMO she did good work.

I admire professional photographers and other working people, even government employees (much of the time).

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Since when does being a government employee disqualify you as a "street photographer"?

Helge said:

She was doing very much the same thing.
Winogrand was on a grant too.
The photographers circumstances doesn’t make much of a difference.

What’s legal isn’t very important here IMO.
People break the law in small ways all the time like this. And the law on public photography is surprisingly lenient in much of the world. And very hard to actually prosecute anyone. Especially if the image is on film, it’s very easy to get rid off and hard to track if scanned.

Making money off of the image of someone else is legal in most civilized countries, if it was done in a public space, which can be very hard to prove or disprove.

The migrant mother formally said yes and let her take the pictures, which is obviously an approval.
Whether she said they wouldn’t be sold or not is impossible to prove.
You should always assume the possibility is there as an adult.

Money and careers (at least one) was made off that image.
Point is: The law is there to stop petty squabbles like this. As unfair as it might seem to some, Lange was in the right, probably also back then.

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YES. YES. YES. But this isn't just a "petty squabble.... there's no such thing as "ethics" when it comes to "street photography" because that is not a phenomenon or reality, it's only a notion. The fact that a tiny photo niche believes that amateur or "art" photography is somehow "better" than professional photography (Langes' for example) is a display of Orwellian or Maoist group think.

Lange was a fine person, a government paid professional photographer who did fine photography for an important cause. People who wander the streets snapping homeless people don't like that.

Lange terrorized her own family. She was a stalker with a camera dreaded by many around here. Yes, a great photographer, but with a LOT of nerve. I knew a certain family member rather well . I simply can't get in someone's face with a camera like that - can't take personally recognizable pictures of people at all apart from their explicit permission, like them paying me for a portrait. I'd never make a good street photographer unless the streets were nearly empty. But she did such things at a very important time in history, and somehow gained a special rapport with the poor and underprivileged. I never met her, and her second husband only briefly a couple times at their home in the hills concerning something completely unrelated. The next generation was more contemporary with me. But there are still stories about her around the neighborhood. Quite a character. The two excellent PBS documentaries on her in recent years seem to be rather accurate. Her family heavily suffered for sake of her art.

I thought the relevant point about Lange being a government employee was that she was on a contract for the Resettlement Administration, and did not personally own the copyright for the work, so the idea that she did it to make a profit doesn't make sense. Copies of the print may have sold later for high prices, but that's the secondary art market - the artist doesn't see any of the cash that a resold print brings in decades later.

Winogrand had grants - he actually had Guggenheim fellowships, I don't know if he ever had a direct grant from a Federal arts agency - but grants are different from contracts. He would have retained copyright to his work. Regardless, a short review of Winogrand's bio will show that he never got rich off it, and taught to make ends meet.

Both of them were very driven people who did what they did (and made photographs in very different ways) for their own documentary impulses and not strictly to get famous (whatever the 1930s or 1960s version of getting internet clicks and likes could be translated to).

These people did all kinds of their own work too, often at the same time, so who holds what kinds of rights can be an involved topic, but it's often by default : who holds the original negatives? Most of Lange's collection is now in the Oakland Museum. In the case of my aunt it's a little easier to figure out, because all of her federally funded murals from that era are now under the protection of the National Historical Register, while all her portable paintings, including studies for those murals, were under her own ownership until either sold to another party, donated, or inherited by family members. Most of the remaining ones are in major museums. Artistic fame back in the Depression era didn't tend to bring much money. The Fed under Roosevelt gave noted artists a bit of help, and the photographers and muralists formalized the intended public message. But they still had to supplement that income as best they could. Times were difficult. Peggy Guggenheim brought a sea change, and most of the Depression era artists were quickly forgotten as the genre of abstract expressionism gained traction. But now a lot of the older work is being re-discovered and re-championed, although I never cared much for Social Realism myself; but my aunt's personal paintings were quite different and relatively uninhibited. It's strange how things work out. I happen to prefer Maynard Dixon's introspective paintings when he had the blues over being divorced by Dorothea Lange, in contrast to his much better known Western art. Something extra special got squeezed out it seems, even if painful.

Helge said:

She was doing very much the same thing.
Winogrand was on a grant too.
The photographers circumstances doesn’t make much of a difference.

What’s legal isn’t very important here IMO.
People break the law in small ways all the time like this. And the law on public photography is surprisingly lenient in much of the world. And very hard to actually prosecute anyone. Especially if the image is on film, it’s very easy to get rid off and hard to track if scanned.

Making money off of the image of someone else is legal in most civilized countries, if it was done in a public space, which can be very hard to prove or disprove.

The migrant mother formally said yes and let her take the pictures, which is obviously an approval.
Whether she said they wouldn’t be sold or not is impossible to prove.
You should always assume the possibility is there as an adult.

Money and careers (at least one) was made off that image.
Point is: The law is there to stop petty squabbles like this. As unfair as it might seem to some, Lange was in the right, probably also back then.

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That image is only known to the public thanks to the the WPA. Lange had a career before it. She owed the government, the WPA, her employer, her services and she delivered. That was only one of her excellent photographs.

There's a huge difference between Winogrand's grant, a freebee based on his past work, and Lange's paychecks, which depended on her labors.

DREW WILEY said:

Lange terrorized her own family. She was a stalker with a camera dreaded by many around here. Yes, a great photographer, but with a LOT of nerve. I knew a certain family member rather well . I simply can't get in someone's face with a camera like that - can't take personally recognizable pictures of people at all apart from their explicit permission, like them paying me for a portrait. I'd never make a good street photographer unless the streets were nearly empty. But she did such things at a very important time in history, and somehow gained a special rapport with the poor and underprivileged. I never met her, and her second husband only briefly a couple times at their home in the hills concerning something completely unrelated. The next generation was more contemporary with me. But there are still stories about her around the neighborhood. Quite a character. The two excellent PBS documentaries on her in recent years seem to be rather accurate. Her family heavily suffered for sake of her art.

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Drew, I spent a little time with her at her home.. and a dear friend spent very important time with her that led to his decision to devote himself to his own particular approach to photography. I also helped with her son on some Cibachrome prints, which he then destroyed by mounting improperly. Some photographers do "dread" getting "into someone's face with a camera" but it's part of an important interpersonal skill for photographers who want to make portraits.

Yes, I realize that. But it does take some nerve which I never personally had. I often admire those kinds of photographs, but realistically will never take one of them myself. All my portraits, whether Cibachromes, or C-prints, or black and white, were done by permission, or rather, by them demanding I be both the photographer, printer, and picture framer - a different ballgame than "street" photography. If people are in a scene at a distance, I don't mind that kind of documentary work, as long as they don't shoot at me. But most of the time I run into something really interesting, it seems like the kind of situation where I will get shot at. Thank goodness for medium format and telephotos, and not just the view camera. Setting up an 8x10 too close to a polygamist cult or survivalist bunker can get one accused of all kinds of things, like being an FBI agent, or using that weird instrument to help the UN invade from Canada to steal their goats and cattle. I've already had my share of close calls.

jnantz said:

for all the street photographers out there, maybe one of the best I have ever had the privilege of seeing his work it is Colin Corneau, a contributor here on photrio.com/ apug.org. seasoned photojournalist, absolutely .. just beautiful work. always with intent, and kindness, empathy and a good heart.
yah there are some obnoxious, macho jerks who do it, they do just like anything, sharp elbow lots of "bro's" who subscribe and yap .. bad apples.. but the good apples, the good ones are really really good.

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That's very kind of you and I thank you sincerely. I'm glad you mentioned 'intent' because I don't go out with a camera to do anything other than picture our shared places...out of a simple joy and fascination with everyday life. I don't go out to make anyone look foolish or bad (although I'm sure there are some who don't like their pictures, but I've noticed that's almost always an internal difficulty they have, not me making them look bad objectively).
I think if you start with that, add some half-decent skills technically, you will do alright. That and a ton of practice, of course.

I often joke that street photography is the least lucrative of all the genres of photography...not entirely jokingly, either. I think a beautiful picture is beautiful regardless, but getting others to agree and purchase is another story.
More likely is selling them as a group or body of work, in a book. Or as has been noted, as part of an educational or workshop. I once sold a few street photography works depicting my former town to the provincial government here, as part of their 'Art Bank' collection...that is one avenue to look into.
One photographer who is a modern master and inheritor of the work started by Winogrand, Meyerowitz and so many others is Andre Wagner known on Instagram as photodre, and seen often in the New York Times. Leica guy, shoots and prints film! He amazes me, every time. EVERY TIME.
Now there is a guy who shoots with heart, passion and empathy...portraying the black neighbourhoods and communities with dignity and truth. Worth getting to know, folks. Anyway, you can take a street photography approach to editorial photography?

To me 'street' photography is just photographing everyday life. That's what National Geographic shooters have done for decades, for example. It's just how I approach photography, period.

Oh, I forgot to add a point about photographing homeless people or otherwise marginalized/vulnerable people.

Doing it isn't inherently bad, it's just a matter -- as with all photography -- of intent. Specifically, how much dignity and empathy you afford the subject.

If you're going to sneak a photo of them, whether you're afraid or just don't think it's worth talking to them, then you are dehumanizing them. You are putting yourself on a level above them instead of looking upon them as equals.

My answer to this is very simple: go ahead, photograph them...after you ask them their name and give them yours. Simple formula. Treat them as you would anyone else in a public space, and there's no problem.

Just had a look-about concerning Colin's recommendation of Andre Wagner. I definitely see where Colin is coming from.
Here is Mr. Wagner's Instagram link: It seems to me that all photographic genres are capable of revealing truth, beauty, power, illumination and humour. Street photography simply tries to do that in a particular environment.
I haven't done much of it for a very long time. I'm not sure I would ever be very good at it, even if I did put the time and effort in to try.

I have all respect for Andre Wagner and what he does...and how he does it. And why too, I guess.

If you're on Instagram you might as well look up Peter Turnley -- his most recent work is in NYC, photographing the COVID catastrophe to befall that city. It's unreal in how raw, emotional and heartfelt it all is.
He did a recent hour long web interview through Leica about this work and it's linked from his Instagram account and I highly recommend it. also.

While you're there, Alan Schaller has nice street work on Instagram.

Colin Corneau said:

Oh, I forgot to add a point about photographing homeless people or otherwise marginalized/vulnerable people.

Doing it isn't inherently bad, it's just a matter -- as with all photography -- of intent. Specifically, how much dignity and empathy you afford the subject.

If you're going to sneak a photo of them, whether you're afraid or just don't think it's worth talking to them, then you are dehumanizing them. You are putting yourself on a level above them instead of looking upon them as equals.

My answer to this is very simple: go ahead, photograph them...after you ask them their name and give them yours. Simple formula. Treat them as you would anyone else in a public space, and there's no problem.

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Then of course you are doing something completely different than traditional “Street”.
Call it portraiture, call it documentary, but it’s not “Street”.
There is ways of giving candid homeless, drunkard or poor people photos a dignified and non-patronizing look. But it is a very fine line and hard to find recent good examples of.
It can be done though. Just takes a lot of taste and luck.