Last time I thought about how I cope with publishing people’s faces.
Indeed, I published not many images with people’s faces. I do not take too many such pictures. Still, if I already took it, and if I want to publish this photograph, how can I be sure that I won’t break the law? I wrote this post because I inspired myself by writing a text named “Shooting pictures of the strangers.” I wrote there a GDPR rule does not help photographers in the case of publishing people’s faces. Speaking shortly: every time I post a photograph of the stranger, I must have a signed agreement that he/she accept that his/her face will be published. Is it possible for street photographers to try to make such an agreement with a stranger? Yes, it is possible to do it.
Nevertheless, I believe that such a bureaucracy would be a total disaster for most street photographers.
So how did I solve this case for myself? Every time I add a photo with people’s faces, I edit the image to the negative. This is how I deal with GDPR. After turning the picture from a positive into a negative, the look of a human’s face disappears. It seems to be the face of a ghost, not a living human. How many times did I already use this trick? It happened twice. The first case occurred in March 2019, in the post named “Thanks to one’s passion, we can meet intriguing people.”
The second case when I published a negative picture of a human occurred in the “Death, part II” work (published in December 2020). The fact is that I do not have many pictures of strangers’ faces. This text is only a free thought regarding thinking about humans’ faces. By the way, I like to recognize people’s faces in mundane reality (for more information, click here: “Big Brother”), but this a plot for a subsequent text.
