Do I need to obtain a Model Release?
A Model Release is a simple contract, a form signed by the subject of a your photograph setting out what are your contractual obligations to each other. If you are working for publishers in the USA, or intend to sell photographs into the stock images market, you will need to get signed model releases for each photograph. Here’s Alamy’s model release page, and here’s one from a US model agency.
In the UK? No.
There is absolutely no requirement in the UK even to ask permission to take someone’s photograph, providing the photographer doesn’t harass the subject in any way.
If someone asks you to take photographs of them for a modelling portfolio, agree the terms for your payment in advance. In UK law the photographs always belong to the photographer, who might in law do anything, including publishing them anywhere, without recompensing the model.
Redeye, the Manchester photography network, say:
“if you are photographing in public for editorial or artistic purposes, it is good professional practice to explain to people what you are photographing them for, and ask them whether they mind their photograph being used. Whether you back this up with a piece of paper is up to you. If you take a photo of someone in the street and then distort it hideously and supply an offensive caption, they should sue you for defamation whether or not they gave consent.”
Photographing children is slightly different: paid child models need to be licensed, so use a reputable model agency. For photographing children who are not professional models, again it isn’t compulsory to obtain a model release, but a signed parental consent form is a good idea if you’re doing studio shoots.
There are a full set of legal forms at the back of the AOP’s Beyond The Lens, and available for free download from their website. The Getty Images model release form is on Page 18 of the PDF.
The standard legal guidance for photographers in the UK is available for download as a PDF from Linda Macpherson. The secretary of Newcastle Uni’s Photo Soc has some slightly more strident advice here.
So If you have photographs of local Yorkshiremen and women, their children and dogs, posing for your camera in the weak spring sunshine on Saltburn pier - go ahead and publish them!
Popularity: 3% [?]
On the Buses
Two photographers documented the last days of the London Routemasters. The depot portraits are particularly magnificent. (via D’log, a recent addition to the RSS reader.)
Engrossing blog and twitterings from a Travel West Midlands driver. It’s brought on some odd feelings of hiraeth. Needs photographs though. (originally via BinS maybe)
Pete Ashton (allegedly) made a Twitter/WordPress RSS mashup for Tweets of the phrase “on the bus”. Everyone studiously avoids the Brum, brum! cliche nowadays.
Popularity: 3% [?]
LiveBrum is - LIVE!
Much effort has recently been applied to what is certainly the best What’s On website around. Live Brum is the brainchild of Josh Hart, co-founder of the mighty Made Media and benevolent host to lots of tiny community-type websites, although he never talks about those.
Apart from a really friendly look and feel, the big, clever usp of LiveBrum is its use of RSS. There are individual feeds for absolutely everything, so you can sign up for just folk, or just gigs at the Drum, or theatre, and if you’ve something to say, a review or just an opinion, you can subscribe to a feed of the comments. For a final stroke of genius, there’s embedding.
It’s brilliant: every city needs one. Congratulations!
Popularity: 3% [?]
Liz Kuball interviews Mrs Deane
Photo credit © Beierle & Keijser
“The drawback of working with photo-based site-specific presentations (I wouldn’t quite call them installations) is obvious: You can’t simply transplant work from one presentation space to the next. Presenting the same photographs in different places often means finding a new context for the work that is as viable as the original one, and I can imagine going so far as to reprint works in a different size if the space asks for it. When viewing our online portfolio, you miss out on this site specificness of the work. We consider the Web site as a kind of documentation of our work rather than as a presentation in some sort of virtual gallery.”
Click through to read the whole thing.
More finds, several per day, are posted on the Newswire. This one deserved special mention.
Popularity: 4% [?]
Hera Festival photos
Some interesting works, and good to see how well a snippet of the Fence series fit in with the eclectic mix. An all round good idea and a very useful experience. Definitely more to come.
If you’d like copies of any of these photos and this is your work, I’ll be offering them under Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial licences for Collective members, mailed as large files or pdfs.
Popularity: 4% [?]
Friedericke Von Rauch
Classical angles, soft available light, linear clarity, textures in concrete and stone, Berlin based Von Rauch is a current inspiration for much of the architectural work including the Get Carter and Pasmore series’. She: “seeks out places and buildings, which in her photographs seem at once strange and familiar. Using an analog camera and the most diffuse, natural light possible, she creates images of mysterious abstraction. In her intensive photographic exploration of architecture, she has developed a very personal visual language, reacting differently to each new place, but always managing to retain her unmistakable approach.” More of Andre Lepik’s erudite expose of her techniques on a PDF here.
How on earth does one get the likes of a brilliant Director of MoMA to review one’s work? Serious question.
Part of a new category for this site, which is in desperate need of reorganisation, as the beginning of assembling some maturity here. Not that there won’t also be some occasional fun and games, but it’s time to get serious, too.
Popularity: 5% [?]
