Judge backs the right of creepy Tribeca artist to photograph people through their windows
Keep your shades down, New York.
A Manhattan judge ruled this week that artistic freedom trumps the rights of parents who don’t want their kids secretly photographed through the windows of their homes.
Judge Eileen Rakower tossed a lawsuit brought by two parents against a Tribeca artist who snapped pictures of their children through their apartment windows as part of a controversial exhibition this year.
“What are the implications here for parents?” said a friend of the plaintiffs yesterday. “You can just have people shooting your kids in their bedrooms, and nothing can be done about it? You can’t just hide behind the word ‘art’ to behave poorly.”
Artist Arne Svenson photographed his Greenwich Street neighbors for an exhibit titled “The Neighbors.”
Making use of their floor to ceiling windows, he captured his innocent subjects engaged in a host of mundane activities, from cleaning the floor to playing with their kids.
But controversy erupted after Svenson’s models learned that they were being photographed without their knowledge — and that the images were being exhibited and sold for up to $10,000 each.
Matthew and Martha Foster sued Svenson — who likened himself to a “bird-watcher” — after realizing that their kids’ pictures were being used to promote the exhibit in California and at the Julie Saul Gallery in Manhattan.
Arguing that his behavior “shocks the conscience and is so out of keeping with the standards of morality in the community,” the couple asked the court to bar him from showing or selling the images.
They also demanded that he turn over all of the images not being used in the exhibit.
But Rakower ruled Monday that Svenson’s artistic freedom superseded their privacy concerns, and dismissed the case outright.
“The value of artistic expression outweighs any sale that stems from the published photos,” Rakower wrote.
The judge also said the end of the exhibition and Svenson’s promise to scrub his Facebook page and Web site of the images figured into her dismissal of the suit
Sources said that photos from the exhibit have sold briskly, and that the Harvard Business School snapped up one shot of a woman in a green dress cleaning her floor.
Now why then was this man arrested? Didn't sell his photos as art?
J-train ‘peeper’ arrest
Paul Martinka
A perv was arrested for allegedly filming inside women's apartment windows through this J train stairway and platform in Brooklyn.
A peeping Tom secretly filmed women through open apartment windows from a J-train elevated platform in Williamsburg, cops said — and he caught one victim giving herself a whole lotta love.
“It’s horrible. It’s creepy and it’s nasty,” the 29-year-old teacher from South America told The Post of being allegedly violated by Gabriel Cardona, 24.
“I felt really safe in that neighborhood, but now that this happened I don’t feel safe.”
Cardona was busted at 11:30 p.m. Wednesday as he allegedly filmed the woman pleasuring herself from the Marcy Avenue station.
“Cardona told cops, ‘I was not going to put the video on YouTube. It was a thrill for me and I was going to show it to my girlfriend,’ ” a law-enforcement source said.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment