Esperanza

I’ve been working with this young lady since she was twenty-two years old and it’s been a rewarding experience. We’re friends of sorts and I get to see her about every five years or so. In this image she was the ripe old age of thirty-five and she was still a ball of fire. I’m not sure that the life she had planned is the one she ended up with but then that true for all of us.
She got in touch with me that first time, a mutual friend had told her about my work. She needed someone that she could trust and have a good time with. She’s a very private person at times but she’s always lived her life large. In her younger days she was thinking of a modeling career and maybe film so she needed to experience the medium. She began to trust me and over several sessions I could shoot what I like and she didn’t even want to see what we’d shot just the finished prints. She gave me a blanket release but I’ve always checked with her for permission and I have no problem abiding by that. Which brings me to the reason(s) I object to the provisions of 2257a.
With a lot of my model we have mutual friends who get very curious as to what we up to photographically. They don’t see why I shouldn’t show them the work we do. I take the approach that it’s not unlike a doctor / patient relationship and how would they like having there personal information out there for all to see. I like getting permission and seeing if my model has any objections to the use of images that we have produced. I promise each model anonymity and that I will keep her identity private no if’s and’s or but’s. But now we are being forced to post that information on each and every image we produce under penalty of law.
In this age of Google people are being hurt by that free flow of information. Consider that the Department of Motor Vehicles will not give you information just from the licence plate without a court order. The idea is to protect people from the very real threat of stalkers. Yet photographers are to leave vulnerable their models and friend to a whole range of discrimination not to mention stalkers. Where is the basic justice in this law. Anyone with knowledge of how to do a search will have access to there very private information. Anyone who doesn’t post that information is libel to a hefty fine and a period of incarceration.
Doesn’t the Department of Justice have more urgent priories than the prosecution of poor photographer’s and their models trying to produce art and trying to make a few bucks. No matter how distasteful it may seem to others, if it’s a willing contract between consenting adults it’s no one else’s business. I can understand the aim of the law is to protect minors from getting involved with shady characters who’ll post there images for profit on some girly site. But that’s not what’s happening here, it’s the wholesale invasion of privacy issue and it affects us all. Models and photographers don’t want their private information posted for all the world to see. I have no problems with the collecting of Driver Licenses as proof of adulthood but I have a real problem with the wholesale collection of information that I have no control of. As a matter of preference I prefer to work with women who have reached an age of reason because my photos last forever. I think eighteen year old models don’t have any business entering into to an adult contract that might harm their future. However if that girl is trying to get into the business or has chosen to dance as a way to survive then they have a right to get them best photographer they can manage.
In the end we can’t protect everyone from themselves, right now teenagers are sending very adult images of themselves to each other by phone. We have a group of very young people who’s live have been destroyed by the very laws that are meant to protect them. Their branded for life as sexual deviants for send images and harmless touching of each other. Where does this end?