When I get back I love seeing the images from the burn. The people, the structures all spread warm memories through my heart. I am reminded of the special times, the special friends, and the unique moments that you can only live and understand on the playa.

However, I am also afraid of the photographers creeping around in the dust, in the structures, in the experience. They are the 3rd person limited narrative displacing themselves from the weirdos so that they can showcase them to the normals. And, being a wage slave to a conservative corporate environment the last thing I need is my cover to be blown by my boss happening across a wild picture some photographer snapped without my knowing.

All of this seems theoretical but in my case it became a reality. I was sitting in my camp when my soulmate from costco came riding up on her bike with her bf. She introduced herself and he hung back near the edge of the camp with his camera. I realized about 2 sentences in that the camera was pointed at us for a while. He had no camera tag and he had not asked my permission to take pictures. Then I realized his lens was lingering a long time. He wasn’t taking stills he was taking video. He was using the Canon 5d DSLR which takes fine video and fine stills.

I asked the couple what are they doing and nonchalantly they stated they were filming a documentary. Well, no way am I going to end up just another one of those crazy the film school couple captured at burning man. I put my hand up to block the lens and told them in no uncertain way that I did not want to be filmed.

And that is when the air changed between us. Before the girl and the guy approached me with open minds and open smiles. Yet, as soon as I said no to their filming or their pictures they clammed up and were insulted. How dare I not let them film me. I invited them to stay and chat and have a beer or water, they refused. Then with the tension hanging unresolved between us they backed out of the camp and left.

Photography and video are powerful things in this current digital age. They are easy to manipulate and take out of context. They are easy to spread.

I want to keep Burning Man a safe space. A place where shirtcockers can feel free to wander around in the dust. Where a woman dancing around nude doesnt need to worry that her picture is going to end up on someone’s blog.

Between the struggle to keep art and expression free versus the rights of the people participating at burning man i vote for the particpants.

The fact is that while these photographers may be at the event taking pictures they are publishing the pictures after the event. If these pics were published at the event or appeared and disappeared with the event or followed the ephemeral way of Burning man then I would be all for them.

However, to me Burning Man is like a sand painting. It exists for that time. You cherish it for that time. Then as it washes away you are left with only your memories.

Honestly, I would just settle with people respectfully asking people’s permission to photograph or video them at Burning Man.

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I had posted it here: http://blog.burningman.com/eventshappenings/burning-man-at-open-video-conference-in-october/.

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Grossly missing from this discussion is artists’ rights when photographers are essentially DOCUMENTING another person’s artwork. In the one-sided contract for funded artists with Black Rock City LLC, the ONLY thing artists retain is their copyright. Despite this, photographs of artists’ works are found all over the internet without giving credit to the author of those works.

Photos of Mark’s temples and Bike Arch also have been found in art shows without a courtesy notification letting artists know, for sale at decompression, and in books without proper artist copyright notices, which should include the artist names. Further, some photographers are unwilling to remove watermarks bearing their copyright, making it appear they are authors of the work.

Until this last time we looked at the website, despite having raised this issue before, proper copyrights were not even included on the Burning Man website, nor were artists notified or given copies of calendars sold by the LLC.
We sincerely hope these items will be addressed.

-llana Spector and Mark Grieve

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One of the Best Things about burning man is that you can be like you want to be without any fear of prejudices you face in the off-playa World.

What would BRC look like if everyone has to fear seeing hisself the week after burningman in the newspaper?

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-Everyone acts differently when others are recording them (they let their hair down less).

-I have a right to privacy.

My opinion:

-People who rely on capturing their experience with cameras don’t act like humans in the moment.

-Burning Man has become more image conscious as photos have come to the playa in front of free expression.

-Someone holding a camera OFFERS NEXT TO NOTHING to the playa experience; I have no use for their retrospectives! I don’t want them in my face.

-It’s a violation of the 4th Amendment of the US Constitution.

Summary:

The more I think about it the more I realize there is nothing we can do to stop people from taking pictures; who wants to see people being ticketed for taking a snapshot? And yet we have to give privacy to critical tits and anyone who came to the playa hoping to feel freedom.
And I’ve seen tons of pervy men on the playa. The irksome creepy types who grimace and don’t contribute a good vibe but rather live off of it like alienated vampires.
For what burning man offers me, and indeed gives us all the relief we look forward too year after year, I think we should make it official policy to ban camera use. I don’t think it should be strongly enforced by the authorities, but it will empower someone who is having trouble with a stranger taking their photo.

My first year someone took a photo of me naked by the carcass wash. I still regret not speaking up and I hope that photo isn’t on the internet somewhere, god knows where.

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The annoying part is that this was not clear to me until after I spent many hours over several years parsing legalese and opinions on this issue. I figured there are so few rules at Burning Man, that I should really follow the rules they have, like no photography without permits. This unnecessarily kept me feeling uptight and like I was doing something vaguely distasteful whenever I took a photograph at Burning Man, even though I was fully in compliance with the spirit of the rules, and was in no jeopardy of punishment. These rules penalize people who pay attention to rules.

So keep whatever minimum amount of legalese is necessary, but add a statement above the legalese that says essentially “This only applies to pornographers, so spread your creativity far and wide, burners!”.

It would be really cool if Creative Commons could come up with a way to handle this in a transparent, standard way, ideally with decentralized community policing instead of centralized censorship, but if not then we’ve got to work with the default legal system.

I still don’t see why anyone is concerned about corporate use of images. Corporations have to play by very strict rules, getting model releases and permission to use recognizable pieces of art in any advertising. So they have zero legal ability to “rip off” creativity from the playa without permission. What if an artist who needs to make a living in the default world sells rights to their playa artwork to a corporation? I say live and let live. Getting good art into corporate advertising is a benefit to society; the idea of staying “pure” is for art school students who have parents to pay their bills, not people who create their own reality. Most advertising these days is photoshopped; corporations can today get around the burning man legalese by compositing a piece of art they want to showcase with stock photos of the non-burningman playa, and if need be composite in a few background models dressed in freaky outfits. It’ll look just like burningman and be legal. To my knowledge all the actual cases of corporate use of burningman artwork have been of this form: composited pictures not taken at Burning Man, so not covered by the ticket legalese.

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However, that led me to a new facet of my issue with photography: commodification of people. One of the 10 Principles is Decommodification. It’s not an easy concept to get your head around: if it were “no commerce”, it would be “Decommercialization”. But it’s about not making people into a commodity.

Consider all the ways we are treated as product. Corporate staffs don’t deal with individuals but interchangeable “human resources.” Your Facebook posts are treated less as sparks of creativity but more as data to be aggregated and distilled to ascertain target groups. How you earn money is treated as if that is what you _are_.

“Decommodification” turns all this upside-down, and once I was immersed in Burning Man for a while, I felt free and real in that unique way for the first time in my life. It has, however, made me much more sensitive to such things all the time. It’s still rather new and I have a hard time articulating it — and worse, most people I have met not only can’t begin to comprehend this alternative, things like targeted marketing make them feel wanted, special, and _more_ unique.

So let me divide up photography at Burning Man into several broad categories:

1. In UK English parlance, “vacation snaps”: people taking pictures of their friends and acquaintances as a record of their time at Burning Man — an innocent use of photography where the image is not the centerpiece, but simply the personal desire for a record.
2. Photographing the physical environment of the event: photographing the material art and such — which can be covered in terms of copyrighted artwork, yada yada.
3. Photographing the people of the event as part of the art: this values the person as an individual far more than the value of the image itself.
4. Photographing the people of the event as a product: this emphasizes the value of the image over the value of the individual.

To me, the entire debate revolves around the reason for photographing people. The black-and-white cases are easy: someone taking an artistic picture of two naked women dancing and sharing it with everyone as a record of Burning Man versus someone taking a high-resolution flash photograph of the same moment and selling it in a collection of pornography. The first case tries to capture the individuality and the moment, the second case commodifies it.

But even if one could find a way to make a rule as to what is too much commodification, there is no way to determine that when the photograph is taken. Worst of all, not even the photographer can ascertain it at that moment.

A bizarre way to think of it is that taking a photograph brings a piece of the future default world into Burning Man — just as walking around with a KFC bucket brings the past default world. Since it’s the future, it isn’t written or known yet, but it definitely drags default-world ideas into the event. On a personal level, I think the ideal reaction is, “don’t worry about it”. When immersed in Burning Man, one does not worry about the future default-world events (be it bills to be paid or New Year’s Eve plans), and I think I’ll try to treat photography the same way.

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