Review. Off Limits.

If the restrictions on freedom of expression are just behind Iraq as a concern for people these days, the news in a new film from Canada will not be encouraging. Off Limits looks at "image rights" (droit de l'image) that are being asserted by people who have their pictures taken on the street. The film begins to write the obituary of a rich field of photography.

One of photography's virtues has been its ability to bear witness to the human landscape. Some of the best photographers to do that have come from France - Henri Cartier Bresson, Robert Doisneau, William Klein, Willy Ronis and Marc Riboud are a few of those who have documented France and Paris. Their pictures are part of the visual record of the last hundred years. If one application of photography was to document and celebrate powerful men, another involved putting the means of documenting ordinary men in the hands of these ordinary men and women, and in the hands of photographers who took pictures of everyday life. Our images of our times come from them, from what we call street photography or humanist photography.

Off Limits (La Rue: Zone Interdite), a 61-minute documentary by Gilbert Duclos, examines the new clash between the right to take a picture and the right of the person being photographed to control that image, regardless of how the image is being used. The film was shown in New York last week at the Dahesh Museum as part of a selection from the Festival International du Film sur l'Art (FIFA), an annual festival in Montreal of films about art, architecture, photography and almost any related field. FIFA is a festival that should get far more attention than it does.

This is Gilbert Duclos's first film, but it looks anything but amateurish. After years of shooting still pictures, he knows how to compose a shot, and he knows how to tell a story. He begins with his own.

In 1988, Duclos published a photograph of a girl sitting in the street in the journal, Vice/Versa, which is based in Montreal. When the girl in question saw her picture, she claimed that her school friends had laughed at it. She and her parents sued Duclos for violating her right to her own likeness by publishing the picture without her consent. The case went through three levels of the legal system of Quebec, and Duclos lost. The plaintiff's right to her image was affirmed - over the opposition of the news media of Quebec, who rallied to Duclos's side - and, Duclos argues, the field of photography called street photography or humanist photography was put at risk. Duclos's own contributions to this field can be seen in his book, Gilbert Duclos: Photographies, 1977-2001, which can be sampled at www.gilbertduclos.com.

He's not the only one who feels that way. Judgments affirming the droit de l'image, or the right to one's image, have been handed down in France, with even broader effects than have been felt in Canada. In Paris, Duclos looks at the impact of those rulings, interviewing photographers like Marc Riboud, the American William Klein (also a filmmaker) and the nonagenarian Willy Ronis, all of whom are deeply pessimistic. Duclos, who is also a character in his film, goes out on the street to test the willingness of the public to sign releases to be photographed. He gets nowhere, proving the point made by his colleagues that the medium has been damaged.

As a result, French photojournalism now removes the faces of people in the street or in any other public setting, or pictures are simply staged. Editors at major magazines tell Duclos that they simply avoid publishing pictures that might trigger lawsuits, which means publishing far fewer pictures, which means that the street photography which has documented much of the 20th century has nowhere near the vitality in the country where it once seemed strongest. Duclos begins the film with scenes of people on the street or in public parks wearing paper bags over their heads. It's corny, but accurate. Add a few opportunistic lawyers, and you've really got an industry - and a problem.

The response by some newspapers and other media has been to stage pictures of public events in public places. It's cheaper and more convenient, one editor says, but it's not life, which is exactly what street photography captured. "We're in quicksand," one photographer tells Duclos.

At a time when Americans are concerned about threats to freedom of expression, Gilbert Duclos sees the United States as a crucial protector of the freedoms that he sees threatened in France. In the US, the use of candid photographs for commercial purposes can be restricted, but editorial use comes under the umbrella of the First Amendment. You don't have to ask for permission to take a person's picture on the street, and you don't have to get that person's permission to publish that picture, as long as that picture is not being used to sell something. The right to privacy that keeps coming up in Off Limits is extremely limited in the US. Should the soldiers whose misdeeds were revealed by the picture of Abu Ghraib have been permitted to sue their fellow GIs who made them public?

Not so in Europe, where the droit de l'image is balanced with free speech. Bear in mind that support for the right to privacy was bolstered by an appalled reaction to the death in a car crash of Princess Diana as she was being pursued by journalists. Add to that the growing exaggerated fear of pedophile voyeurism and the exploitation of adolescents' images on the internet, and you have an atmosphere in which broad decisions can be made that make broad restrictions on press freedoms, especially for photographers.

Duclos joins the ranks of still photographers who have gravitated toward the moving image - Raymond Depardon, Albert Maysles, Abbas Kiarostami, Robert Frank, Robert Benton and others. Yet he also has a gift for storytelling, and for letting other storytellers speak. Photographers like Willy Ronis are eloquent when they (and their pictures) demonstrate how important photography has been for our memory of recent history. "We liked to set out to record life's happenings at random," Ronis tells Duclos. It's not about simply taking a photograph, but publishing a photograph. It's the sharing of the image that is crucial, and it is the sharing of images that is now most under threat.

Think about that the next time you see pixilated faces in the news coverage of a public place.

As of now, Off Limits has not been distributed theatrically in the US or in English-speaking Canada. You can obtain the DVD through www.virage.ca.

Posted by dwhudson at October 29, 2006 6:58 AM