I was reading in a coffee shop a couple of months ago when a young man asked if he might take my photograph. I said that I would rather he didn't - which was churlish, because I have taken pictures of strangers myself. I was rude, I guess, because the more wonderfully apt and sensitive his picture of a grumpy, grey-haired man reading might be the less I wanted that man to be me. In France, where the moral right of artists and the right to privacy of subjects are particularly well-protected, there have been legal challenges to the assumption that a photographer is free to appropriate a stranger's face - and (more particularly) make money out of it. Some say these cases spell the end of photojournalism as we know it.

LRB 4 April 2002 | PDF Download