I imagine part of what changed (at least more recently) is youtube and social media. There's a difference between a black and white film shot and a video that can be instantly uploaded and seen by potentially millions.GaijinPunch wrote:As a hobbiest street photog, the story as of late has always come down to ethics as subjects are not consenting to the photo 99% of the time. Rock star (in my mind) photographer Issei Suda would often lament the old days in the forewords of his books, concluding that the days of being able to innocently approach a stranger with a camera and take a photo are long gone. I find this ironic as we are on cameras all the time, everywhere, and this video is proof.
So for the people that are ardently against my hobby (which are many) I am always a bit confused.
Going back much farther cameras were more novel, film just a bit valuable and probably few subjects had any notion of an image being of any use outside of being a snapshot, artistic or otherwise.
There's also a difference between a human holding a camera with the intent to to capture something specific vs a cctv camera that silently records everything even an empty street. I can imagine most people are pretty naive about how often they're on camera, or they tune it out. As far as the cops in that case it could be they were conscious of the evidence being recorded, but didn't feel like they were that far out of bounds given how common police brutality is and how rarely it gets punished. Even the cops who beat Rodney King got off.
I knew a guy back in the day who planned sort of an epic tour of the country doing art photography of people. IIRC he used a false pretense to approach people, like he was with an agency promoting clean water or something. He ended up getting his camera broken and severely beaten to the point of hospitalization bc he approached the wrong people with a camera. This was probably more than 20 years ago? So there's also just the random factor where you need to watch yourself in certain places or around certain people.