When your photo harms me
Iam a Korean-American native of Queens. Growing up here, the city has often played the role of a third parent in my life. Its museums beckon me in for warmth and beautiful paintings on chilly days. The halal carts on every corner feed me when I am hungry. When I need to talk, a wise cabbie is only a hail away. There’s only been a few times in my life when New York let me down, and they all happened in broad daylight in some of our most recognizable public places.
When I was 17, I was sitting in Bryant Park. An older man walked by with two cameras and discreetly aimed one at me. I immediately called 911. A police officer made him destroy one of his rolls. Because he refused to say which camera he’d used, to this day I’m not sure if the photo lives on somewhere. What I do remember, 17 years later, is the violation and fear that I felt as a strange man captured something of mine, my image, without my permission. He got to walk away.
Five years ago, I was walking down 57th St. A man with a long-zoom camera lens pointed it at me and took a rapid series of photographs. When I confronted him, he said it was a “free country.” As he tried to get away, I grabbed him and called 911. Four Business Improvement District workers approached us and began commiserating with him as I, the victim, stood gripping my perp by his bag. One said I was “making a scene” while another joked that “maybe he just liked the pictures.”
The cop who arrived 40 minutes later discovered that my assaulter had taken dozens of full-body burst shots of me, which he was told to delete. I watched him walk away in his tan cap and polo shirt, with tears streaming down my face and cramps in my hand. I wondered whether I should have worn a different dress to work that day. I wondered whether he’d think twice before pointing his lens at another young woman, or whether, more likely, he’d become even more emboldened, knowing that at worst he could walk away.
In the wake of #MeToo, I often found myself thinking about this last incident. I was proud that I stood up for myself, but I promised myself that if it ever happened again, I’d do something “real” about it.
Then, last December, I was in Chelsea with my mother, talking and laughing. A young man lifted his camera inches from my face.
“It’s not illegal,” he said. “It’s art. Get away from me.” He deleted my photo and walked away.
He’s right: It’s not illegal to take photos of people in public. But women are victimized by this lack of legal protection of our images. In 2014, a D.C. judge dismissed charges against a man who had taken photos up women’s skirts at the Lincoln Memorial. A similar ruling in Tennessee in 2016 cleared a 40-year-old man who followed women around Walmart with a camera on their breasts and buttocks.
A court in Texas also sided with a middle-aged man who took more than 70 photos of children’s chests and buttocks at Sea World.
Taking upskirt photos is a felony in New York. But while it’s great that taking photos of specific body parts is considered a crime, any act of photographing someone in a degrading, violative way without her consent in public is wrong and the law should reflect that.
New York can’t be a safe place for girls and women when any man can point a camera at us and walk away with our faces and our bodies in his files. We should set an example for the country and protect women against all nonconsensual, exploitative photography and videography.
I have been working with Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer on legislation convening an image privacy task force that will address photography as a vehicle of gender-based violence i n public places. If this bill is passed, the next perp will have to think twice before assaulting another woman on our streets in the name of “art,” or a “free country.”
As a city that prides itself on progressive values, and as one of the most photographed places i n the world, we need to make sure that our laws are contemporaneous with our increasingly nuanced understanding of women’s rights, and with the constantly evolving ways in which images — and people — can be manipulated and exploited. Please join me and write, call and email your council member to voice support for this legislation, which is only the first step. New York can and should be a safe place for everyone under its watch.
Son lives in Queens and works in the nonprofit sector.