Judge rules photographer can film his neighbors

Art Newspaper - New York’s Supreme Court decided last week that the photographer Arne Svenson was within his rights to display and advertise a series of photographs he took of his neighbours without their permission. In May, a local couple sued Svenson for violating their privacy after recognizing their young children in two of the images. The judge Eileen Rakower dismissed Martha and Matthew Foster’s suit on 1 August, writing that the family’s right to privacy “yields to an artist’s protections under the First Amendment in the circumstances presented here”.

Svenson spent a year and a half observing his neighbours with a telephoto lens as they ate breakfast, read and watched television in the glass building across the street from his Tribeca apartment. “For my subjects there is no question of privacy,” Svenson wrote in an artist statement. “I am not unlike the birder, quietly waiting for hours, watching for the flutter of a hand or the movement of a curtain as an indication that there is life within.”