Appellate court upholds First Amendment rights but encourages stricter privacy laws in future By Julia Halperin. Web only Published online: 10 April 2015 Arne Svenson, Neighbors #11, 2012 A New York appellate court has reluctantly upheld the rights of the photographer Arne Svenson to exhibit and sell photographs he took of his neighbours without their permission. The unanimous decision by a seven-judge panel is a win for First Amendment advocates. But the court itself seemed uneasy about its conclusion, calling the photographs “disturbing” and encouraging the local government to expand privacy laws that would curtail similar work in the future. Svenson’s series “The Neighbours”, shown at New York’s Julie Saul Gallery in 2013, captured the daily lives of residents of a downtown luxury apartment building as they ate breakfast, scrubbed their floors and watched television. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, is due to open an exhibition of “The Neighbours” in February 2016. One work from the series is in the collection of Harvard Business School. The artist, who has likened himself to a bird watcher, monitored his neighbours for more than one year and took thousands of photographs of them with a telephoto lens. (He also consulted a privacy lawyer and watched the Hitchcock film “Rear Window” four times.) Two residents of the building, Martha and Matthew Foster, sued Svenson after they saw an image of their young children published in a local newspaper article about the series. A state appellate court reinforced a lower trial court’s decision to dismiss the case on 9 April. The judges concluded that Svenson’s First Amendment rights as an artist outweighed the family’s right to privacy in a city as dense as New York. Unsettled by the images, the judges also encouraged the state to expand its privacy laws. “Many people would be rightfully offended by the intrusive manner in which the photographs were taken,” Judge Renwick wrote. “In these times of heightened threats to privacy posed by new and ever more invasive technologies, we call upon the legislature to revisit this important issue, as we are constrained to apply the law as it exists.” Neither Svenson nor a lawyer for the Foster family immediately responded to a request for comment. Another exhibition of Svenson’s work is on view at Julie Saul Gallery until 30 May. “The Workers”, a sequel to “The Neighbours”, presents close-up images of men engaged in manual labour.
I agree or side with the Photographer, If you want, or expect, privacy...then don't stay near (open) Windows -- whatever you see or spot or record happening ...that's fair, legal game
Yeah, it's a dicey one, but gotta side w/the photographer. You are in public view so he's free to photograph as he pleases.
So someone can take pictures of your child and publish them for financial gain and you have no right to stop that? Judges got it wrong here. Arnie points out the hypocrisy of the judgment.
Many places have peeping tom laws that would seem to apply here. It's one thing to observe an unblocked window. Focusing a telephoto lens on it for days hoping to capture something unusual strikes me as another matter. I also thought you could not use another person's image for commercial purposes without their consent. Perhaps that is only for celebrities, which seems very unfair.
In NY you can use anyone's image as long as they were at a public location, I guess being by the window is considered a public location.
All the paparazzi photographers would be out of work then. Its good that the rich and powerful can be spied on in public, they do enough shady deals behind the scenes as it is.
I don't know exactly where the line is here. I know you can't use Tom Brady's picture in your advertisement. There was a famous case years ago involving the use of Joe Namath's picture for commercial purposes. I suppose you can publish a picture of Tom Brady on a public beach. This case is a little different, as it involves the definition of what is public. Using a telescopic lens to photograph people inside their homes seems clearly abusive to me and vastly different from pictures taken in public. What if he used an infrared system to capture images of people having sex inside their houses? Would that also fall within the "artists' First Amendment rights" invented by these idiot judges?