Duesseldorf City Blues

While spending some days at my parents’ house in Italy, I decided to update myself about laws and photography down here. Basically you can forget street photography in Italy, because:

• The publication or sale of portraits of people is forbidden unless you have a written release from the interested person.
• If the person is famous or notorious or part of the news or a particular event, then the publication can be done without consent.
• If the photograph is somehow harming the reputability or the honor of this person (who decides what is reputable, who decides what is honorable?), you cannot even publish pictures of famous or notorious people.
• Children must never be recognizable on a photo.

Two important points are the concepts of portrait and the one of publication.

• A photograph is considered as a portrait if one person (or more) inside of the photo is the central part of the photo itself. You should ask yourself: “if I take the same photo, without that person, would the photo change significantly?” If the answer is yes, then it is a portrait. 99% of street shots are portraits, under this definition.
• In many countries publication refers to mass media. In Italy publication is considered also hanging the photo in a gallery or any other place where access is not restricted.

Exceptions? If you are taking a picture of a certain place and by accident there is a passerby, and this passerby is not important to the economy of the picture itself, then it does not apply. It is basically a “right to take panoramas”

An Italian website has made a small list of examples that let you understand how critical the situation is, the explanation is in Italian, but the “stop”/”ahead” traffic signals next to the examples should make the thing clear for everybody!

A major difference between the Italian law and the laws of other countries, is the total absence of any reference to photography as Art. German laws clearly state“the higher interest of Art” as an exception, and in several court cases in the U.S. the “right to artistic expression” has been recognized in the case of disputes between photographers and unwillingly portrayed people.

One thing you can feel safe about: the act of taking pictures is not forbidden. Private citizens or police cannot ask for your film or camera or memory card. Confiscation of photo equipment can be only decided by a judge. Do not expect that all citizens and policemen know this.

What about the way people react, instead? Usually people are quite friendly if you ask for permission, but really avoid being in the nearby of children with a camera, because the Italian media have spread such a panic that the connection photographer + children = pedophile is automatic in most of the people.

I think I will stop complaining about doing street photography in Germany!

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The way I shoot is slowly changing. It’s not that I do this by purpose or intention, but I look at the results and compare them with some previous work.  These pictures have less dynamics of my previous ones, have less impact and are more formal. Probably they are also more boring to someone, but this is the way I like it right now.

One thing that I’m trying to achieve since a year or so is to try to catch moments in between. When nothing is happening. There is a background to this, and it is that most people cannot tell what they do with 90% of their time.They look just plainly bored and their whole life looks like some kind of nonsense wait for something. Trying to catch the action, the interesting event, is strange under this presupposition. I could hang around a corner for half an hour and probably there would be one only event worth of note in that place and it would last less than a few seconds. If I photograph it, am I representing the place? The situation? The people? Am I building some kind of world where everything is always interesting and perfect and way too cool? It can be the difference between an MTV clip and a movie from Bergman. What do MTV clips have?

Several years ago I read about a small experiment, called the Zen TV experiment. You can read the article I have linked and make your idea about its’ meaning. For me it was like creating the conditions, with animated images, so that people must watch and cannot stop doing so. It’s something hardwired in our brains we cannot get rid of. I think that some kind of photographs try to create similar effects using catchy colors, or audacious composition with the purpose to get attention at the first glance. Then everything dissolves in the white noise of coolness or confirmation of messages that we already know.

I am not trying to say that I photograph things that do not interest me, but I am strangely attracted by these daydreaming states that people live. When their body is in the place but their mind is somewhere else, distant, far. Probably because I used to daydream a lot and now I more with my head on my shoulders. Probably because I see how the more north you go, the more people look like detached, lost into themselves, unwilling to communicate with glances or smiles. Somehow I am aware that people will find less interesting looking at this kind of things. It’s normal, if they are bored they search for entertainment, looking at bored people might not quite fit the purpose!

But, what the hell, it’s the Duesseldorf City Blues. At the Big Fun Fair on the Rhine.

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It’s fun to go through some older material, from time to time. When I think about my older pictures, I often have the latent impression that they were better than the recent ones, but when I start browsing through the older stuff I can see how my photos have improved. At that time I was considering “good”, some stuff that right now I wouldn’t even bother shooting.
I took this one a couple of years ago, and wrote a small poem.

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That Duesseldorf City Blues
Was going to get me ill
That Duesseldorf City Blues
Was going to get me sick

Wuppertal they told me
Where the sun always shines
Wuppertal they told me
Where no one ever cries

So I hopped on that train
Direction east
Yes, I hopped on that train
Just to get myself lost

And there I was
And there I was

Some people might recognize the classic blues structure in this short writing, where some lines are repeated within the same verse. This structure was used by early bluesmen, who were improvising lyrics while the band was playing. Repeating one line gave the time to the singer to think about the next one in rhyme.

I think that several people, reading the title of the blog, think that it must be a concentrate of sadness, but blues has a much more vast meaning, and I am sure that no one ever cried while listening to the music of the Blues Brothers or Booker T. and the M.G.’s. So the baseline is: if you see this picture and read the poem and you laugh, you’re on the right track. If you feel sad, well, honestly I can understand you as well.

By the way, I added a small [click on picture to enlarge] under the photo, actually you can do it with any photo on this site, but I just thought that someone might have not noticed until now.