Because, you know, what the world needs now is more lawsuits.

Schwarzenegger, himself a celebrity, has approved a measure which states that the rights of a free press "to report details of an individual's private life must be weighed against the rights of the individual to enjoy liberty and privacy." That sounds reasonable… or does it?

Magazines and blogs (like this one) buy pictures of stars everyday; how are we to know if the snapper was over Lindsay Lohan's property line or not? What if you were fined for clicking on an illegally obtained photo? What if you went to buy ice cream, and later found out that the ice cream you bought was stolen, and you were being sued by a rich person for eating it?

As Dionne Searcy writes for the Wall Street Journal:

Some legal experts… question whether the California law is enforceable. In general, it remains legal for individuals to take photographs of other people, as long as the photo is snapped in a public place. In many cases, they add, it can be difficult to determine where a photo was taken after the fact.

In addition, there's a concern that celebrities are getting special treatment. Your house is on Google Street View; journalists have the right to pursue a story by knocking on your door or photographing you on the sidewalk if you are, say, a dry-cleaner ripping off customers, a lottery winner or a suspected terrorist.

But a measure okaying lawsuits is really saying: Celebs! Go ahead and sue. You have money! The snappers and blogs and magazines will be sorry they fucked with you.

Look, I'm not saying it's right to jump a hedge to get exclusive picture of someone's backyard wedding. Laws should not be broken. But taking a magazine or blog to court and fining them as much as $50,000 for not knowing that shot is illegal doesn't seem right either.

A New California Law Places Paparazzi Under The Spotlight [WSJ]

"I have never yet seen, and you probably never will see, a fashion or beauty picture that hasn't been retouched. Unfortunately, we are living in a retouched world."

— photographer Derek Hudson, who says he would "make a stink" if an editor Photoshopped his pictures.

"When teenagers and women look at these pictures in magazines, they end up feeling unhappy with themselves… If people knew they had to describe what they had altered, it might make them less likely to do it. These photos can lead people to believe in realities that very often, do not exist."

— Jo Swinson, a British member of Parliament from the Liberal Democratic Party, which wants to ban altered photos entirely in ads aimed at children under 16.

"I spent the first 10 years of my career making girls look thinner. I've spent the last 10 making them look larger."

— Robin Derrick, creative director of British Vogue.





Lifting the Veil of Mere Pixel Perfection [NY Times]

Earlier: France Proposes "Health Warning" Label On Photoshopped Images
British Lawmakers Take Stand Against Photoshop
Here's Our Winner! 'Redbook' Shatters Our 'Faith' In Well, Not Publishing, But Maybe God
The Annotated Guide To Making Faith Hill 'Hot'
Faith Hill's 'Redbook' Photoshop Chop: Why We're Pissed

As Phil Coomes reports on the BBC blog Viewfinder, Maisie Crow has been selected as the winner of this years Ian Parry Award. Ian Parry was a photojournalist who died in 1989 at age 24 while on assignment for the Sunday Times. The scholarship foundation was created by Parry's friends and family, and provides support to one young photographer (under 24) each year. The award is given to the photographer whose work best expresses a "personal vision," both through images and the accompanying text. This year, the judges selected Crow, a graduate of the School of Visual Communication at Ohio University for her series Love Me.

Love Me is a striking collection of images that depicts the everyday life of a teenager from Ohio, who Crow renames "Autumn." Autumn lives with her parents and two siblings. According to her father, the family of survive on a mere $14,000 a year (this is over $10,000 less than the federal poverty line for a family of their size). On Crow's website, she explains,

[Autumn] is coming of age in an environment that lacks the emotional and financial resources to facilitate her growth into adulthood. At this vulnerable point in her life, she is seeking love and support but has a difficult time finding people who can provide emotional stability.

Autumn is growing up in the cycle of generational poverty.

However, poverty is only one of the many difficulties Autumn faces in her day-to-day life. The general tone of Love Me is rather bleak and discomforting, but some particularly unsettling images reveal the violence that has become commonplace in Autumn's life. Crow's photographs impart a feeling of extreme unease through her stark yet visually intense representation of Autumn's world. The picture above shows Autumn sitting between the legs of a male relative, who tried to rape her four years ago. Autumn has told her family about the attack, but her parents do not believe her.

Another disturbing scene shows a man, identified by Crow as Autumn's ex-boyfriend, assaulting her over the kitchen sink. He pushes her head down toward the running faucet as Autumn raises her hand in what could be either self defense or shock. Crow also documents a cluster of bruises on Autumn's breast, which were the result of a neighbor's unwelcome attention. "She started dating him the following week. She says she felt sorry for him and that he said he would not hurt her again," reads Crow's caption.

Although Autumn is only a pseudonym, the disturbing world represented in Love Me is real. An exhibition of Maisie's work will be on view at the Getty Images Gallery in London starting August 5th for one week.

Ian Parry Award Winner [Viewfinder]
Ian Parry Scholarship [Official Website]
Maisie Crow [Official Website]

Lillian Bassman was a prominent fashion phographer from the 40s- to the early 60s' -New York's "Mad Men" heyday, in a time when women stars were rare. As a profile in today's Times explains, working with Harper's Bazaar, Bassman brought a new aesthetic to editorial work that came, she says, from the fact that models didn't have to play to men when they worked with her, and as such the sexuality she showcased was softer, more natural, more comfortable. Her commercial advertising work was equally influential: whereas lingerie photography had centered around a "pharmeceutical aesthetic" that emphasized underpinnings' ability to bind and correct, Ms. Bassman made it something sexy. As the Times puts it, "In place of heavy-set women constraining themselves in what was essentially equipment, Ms. Bassman deployed immeasurably lithe models, conveying a world in which women seemed to linger in the pleasures of their own sensuality. In her eye the undergarment emerges as a wardrobe unto itself, as if anything else in a woman's closet were simply an imposition."

While mentally one might add "for good or ill" this contradiction - of on the one hand creating an aesthetic that arguably imprisons women to this day, and on the other, emphasizing female sexuality - is characteristic of Bassman's career. Her famous decision to destroy her photographic archive in the 1970s is the most obvious example of this. Having devoted her career to documenting and creating an image of sophisticated adult womanhood, she was dismayed by what she perceived as the girlish fashions of the mod era and, later, the heavy-handed sexuality of the later decade. She also disliked the egos and demands of the new breed of supermodel, which ran counter to her concept of photographer as creator. In an act of both defiance and mourning, then, she destroyed the bulk of her negatives and threw the rest into a garbage bag in the garage.

What might be seen as reflexive conservatism is perhaps strange given Bassman's own history: while she may not have seen a place for herself in the new era of "liberation," her own history had been highly unconventional: with her immigrant parents' permission, she'd lived with her boyfriend from the age of fifteen, not marrying for ten years. Yet she disliked the trappings of the women's movement and apparently wanted no part of an industry she'd helped open to other women.

It's only recently, in her 90s, that her views have softened; as new technology has become available, Bassman's set about trying to resurrect some of her old images, using the discarded negatives and working with archived images and photoshop, a challenge she apparently enjoys. And there is a renewed interest in her work: the next year sees the publication of the book Lillian Bassman: Women
, two gallery shows and a retrospective in Germany. The exhibitions will feature her commercial work, her reworked images and some of her non-fashion photography.

In all these showcases, the focus is on the artist in relation to her primary subject, women. Which begs the question of her legacy as a female artist - and even a feminist. While she doesn't invite the debate to the same extent, in some ways Bassman's case provokes some of the same controversy as does Helen Gurley Brown's. Both were bold women succeeding on guts in a man's world - and, in giving the treatment of women a modern and feminine slant, still working essentially for the male gaze. More strikingly, both seemed more wedded to these compromises and an earlier, more glamorous vision of femininity, than in the gains they helped earn. There is certainly a case to be made as Bassman as stealth female advocate: as the Times puts it,

In the period dominated by Avedon and Irving Penn, Ms. Bassman was one of the few female photographers in the fashion business, and her work had a distinctly different cast from the outset, one less distancing. In most of the lingerie pictures, for example, the faces are averted or obscured, the result of the Ford agency's insistence that its models not be identifiable in such provocative advertising. The effect of this constraint is not cold anonymity but an unusual intimacy that leaves the images feeling almost entirely divorced from commodity, as if they were the visual entries in the personal journals of the women photographed.

But whatever the aesthetic triumphs, was the illusion of "divorce from commodity" altogether a positive thing? Now, I'm not saying this was Bassman's responsibility - she was a commercial photographer doing gorgeous work, and undoubtedly shot women with uncommon sensitivity. Her concerns, as is clear from her actions of the 1970s, were aesthetic. I pose it more to those who'd position her less ambiguously than she positioned herself. Her decision to sexualize lingerie, after all, and redefine its models as sexual objects - a triumph for feminine sensuality, perhaps, but can anyone claim this was a purely beneficial act? Especially given her contribution to narrowing aesthetic standards. Again, this is no criticism of her work, but merely questions that I think need be asked about any contributor to the popular aesthetic. At the end of the day, it seems pretty clear that Lillian Bassman would choose to be viewed as a photographer, and a professional - and I'm happy to pay her that compliment.

Femininity, Salvaged [NY Times]

Diane Arbus is one of the most controversial and iconic photographers of the 20th century, but until now, many of her works have been hidden from view. Two upcoming exhibitions of her photographs in the UK inspired the Telegraph to ask the inevitable question: are her portraits of society's outsiders, the handicapped, and other so-called "freaks" exploitative, or sympathetic?

Arbus rose to fame in the 1950s and 1960s for her photographs of the "freakish side of life." She has been criticized for her chilling images of, as Susan Sontag put it, ''people who are pathetic, pitiable, as well as repulsive.'' Born into a wealthy Jewish family, Arbus (originally Diane Nemerov) was fascinated by the seedier areas of New York. Because of her desire to "go where [she'd] never been," Arbus was often accused of being a voyeur, a rich girl practicing willful escapism, held at a safe distance by her family's money. Sontag criticized Arbus's work as ''based on distance, on privilege, on a feeling that what the viewer is asked to look at is really other."

As Lucy Davies for the Telegraph points out, her photographs do lend themselves easily to this reading, and yet...

At first it seems Sontag might have a point: Arbus's pictures are devoid of empathy and furtively, even uncomfortably absorbing. But this is only half the story. Listen to Arbus herself: "Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats". They have ''a quality of legend'' about them, ''like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle.'' She venerated, even idolised them.

Arbus further bridged the gap between photographer and subject by becoming personally close to her unconventional muses. If Arbus was a voyeur, she was a surprisingly adept and involved one. She was friends with Eddie Carmel, the "Jewish Giant," for ten years before she took a photograph of him. She not only captured these people on film, she also entered their lives and homes - many of her pictures are titled "in her bedroom," or "at home." Arbus believed that she was immortalizing and elevating her subjects, while giving them the personal attention everyone secretly craves.

"If I were just curious" she explained "it would be very hard to say to someone, 'I want to come to your house and have you talk to me and tell me the story of your life'. I mean people are going to say, "You're crazy." Plus they're going to keep mighty guarded. But the camera is a kind of license. A lot of people, they want to be paid that much attention and that's a reasonable kind of attention to be paid".

Diane Arbus: A Flash Of Familiarity [Telegraph]

Some photographers even illegally tint the windows of their cars and remove the licence plates so they won't get caught. But others are right out there in the open: Recently, TMZ.com set up a camera on a tripod across the street from the Urth Caffe, an establishment stars are known to frequent. The cafe's founder, Shallom Berkman, was shocked: "They did it without permission," he says. Berkman also notes that some photographers do anything to get the shot. "They run right through the cafe. It's like we're invisible. It hurts our business and makes it uncomfortable for celebrities and patrons to enjoy." Except people do enjoy pictures of celebrities. A few years ago, tabloid magazines were the only place you could see Lindsay Lohan getting coffee. Now, web sites (including this one!) report up-to-the-minute details on the stars personal lives, and even MSNBC.com has a gossip column. And not only do people want to see photographs of stars, they want the same treatment: "Personal paparazzi" services are springing up across the country, according to Time magazine. Celeb 4 A Day provides clients with their own cameraman stalkers — and cool shots of them living their lives, (having a birthday party, going bar-hopping) if they want. "The goal isn't to produce a product," University Of Pennsylvania sociologist David Grazian says. "It's to heighten the experience of the event. In that sense, there doesn't even need to be any film in the camera."

Chronicling the lives of idols — and ourselves — is nothing new. But the sheer volume and intense scrutiny we've come to think of as normal, really isn't. We're barrelling down a "what's yours is mine" road at breakneck speed and assuming that because we once saw someone's movie that we deserve to see them without makeup in a drug store. (Or menstruating through their underwear.) Does anyone feel like eventually something's gotta give?

Paparazzi Are Their Focus [LA Times]
Your Own Personal Paparazzi [Time]
Disturbing Trend of the Day: Personal Paparazzi [Portƒolio]