Flycatcher and Fred

Check out this video shot in super slow motion on the NYC subway. It's pretty cool. It's so slo-mo that you forget it's video and start viewing it as a series of moving portraits. Only if you look very, very carefully can you see one or two people actually moving... it's that over cranked. It's like some trippy 3D never ending panoramic photo.

I like it.

The problem is that now every one of these people is in this guy's movie and they don't even know it. They were not asked to give permission, or compensated, and now it's all over the Internet, forever.

How do we feel about that?

Personally, I feel that even in public, people are entitled to a reasonable expectation of privacy, that their face is not going to be put on the internet without their knowledge. The man who made this video, Adam Magyr, is an artist and likely profits (or hopes to) from the sale and/or display of his work. This isn't an iPhone video, the guy definitely needed permission from the MTA to mount his camera in a subway car, so shouldn't he also need permission from the subjects he is shooting?

Now if I was to do a shot like this as part of a commercial, at the very least I would need a release from every person on this platform, and the client would also need to compensate them, since they are appearing in a commercial and the client will profit from sales generated by that commercial. It's kind of like that J-Lo/Fiat commercial that showed a mural by Tats Cru without getting the artist's permission first.

I know this isn't a commercial, but it's not like it's a photograph that's hanging in someone's house. This is posted on the Internet for everyone to see on Magyr's website, as well as the Gothamist, and anyone else who may have written about it. It's not a crowded sidewalk in a movie where there's a ton of people and no one face is featured. Every single one of these people is featured prominently in this work. They did not contract with him to create this work. They are models in his art, and the last time I checked, models get paid.

I'm very much aware that we're constantly and unwittingly being photographed by omnipresent security cameras but it's not the same thing. Security video is shot for security purposes. Maybe an infinitesimal amount ends up on the Internet, available to the public, but for the most part, no. This video was created by Magyr expressly to be viewed by the public, and that's a different thing entirely.

I'm not a Magyr hater, I've looked on his site and I like the work. What this really does is open the door to a social experiment I've been dying to try but up till now didn't feel was appropriate.

Here's a photo I took of my wife and kids on the High Line on Mother's Day, 2012. I've blurred my girls because a) they're my girls, and b) this is the Internet, and privacy is the whole point of this exercise anyway. Trust me, they're gorgeous.

It's the desktop photo on my laptop, so I look at it every day. A lot. After a couple of weeks I began to wonder about the other people I'd captured inadvertently in the photo, particularly the two gentleman flanking my girls.

The fellow on the left was captured at a particularly inopportune moment (for him, anyway). I call him "Flycatcher".

The other (a harmless enough looking bespectacled chap), I simply call "Fred." I don't know why, he just looks like a "Fred" to me.

I've often wondered if I posted this image on Facebook inquiring "do you know these guys?" what would happen. Is my social circle, and my social circle's circle and their circle, and so on and so on and so on, robust enough that in time this photo would reach people who knew Flycatcher and Fred? I tend to think yes. Because even though it's a pretty big city, it's a small, small world.

Granted, this blog has a much smaller footprint than a status update on Facebook, but it's a place to start.

But more importantly, Flycatcher... Fred... anyone?