The Commercial Street Photographer: The Right to the Street and the Droit à l’Image in Post-1945 France

Abstract

This article examines the history of the commercial street photographer, or photofilmeur, in France from 1945 to 1955. Although itinerant photographers had long operated, they organized as a new profession after the Second World War in response to hostile reactions from other ‘sedentary’ photographers, conservative officials, lawmakers, and the police. Tracing the fight to regulate and even ban photofilmeurs in state and police archives, courtroom accounts, and union publications, this article reveals a struggle over the who, what, and where of photography: Who has the right to photograph whom? Can you take pictures of people without their consent? What is professional photography? Answers to these questions recast the history of street photography not as an aesthetic category, as most scholarship treats it, but in terms of the medium’s engagement with the law and issues of consent, intent, copyright, privacy, and dissemination that are at the heart of 20th and 21st-century photographic history.

Weegee, Standing By

“…6 Informed by the revised photographic ontologies of Vilém Flusser and Ariella Azoulay, who insist, each in their way, that photography be understood to analytically contain the fuller technical and psychic infrastructures upon which its functioning depends and into which its image production is inevitably enfolded, much recent scholarship better weaves street photography's images into the tangled systems of their pictured worlds (Flusser 2005; Azoulay 2012). Catherine Clark, addressing the commercial variant of the photofilmeur and the postwar French legal structures they troubled, argues explicitly against Bystander's passive-aggressive register, to insist that "we must reframe the street photographer as a participant in-not a bystander to-the social world" (Clark 2017). Krista Thompson has considered commercial street portrait photography in the United States and Jamaica in terms of the complex social dynamics present in the production of the image over and above the pictorial logic of the image itself (Thompson 2015).…”