Photographs of fans: An addition to Fanlore's Image Policy

[fanloremod]

Thank you to everyone who has submitted feedback on the proposed addition to our Image Policy regarding photographs of fans on Fanlore.

 

Because we have already received a great deal of feedback on the draft policy, we have taken the decision to close the comments in order to get to work on revising this policy.

 

We realise that the original proposed text of the policy would not have been at all sufficient to protect fans' privacy and identity in the online world that we live in, and that this disappointed and alarmed many people. We fully acknowledge that it was not in line with what fandom would have expected from Fanlore and our commitment to protecting fans' identities, and we sincerely apologise for this. We will take all of the concerns expressed on board and work to produce a policy that is much more robust in protecting fans as we carry out our mission of documenting fandom.

 

Thank you again to everyone who took the time to respond to this proposal.

Original policy text:

Can I upload photos of fans to Fanlore?

Please be thoughtful when uploading photos of fans. Is this your own photo or one you found online or in a magazine? If you know the person in the photo, check with them about how they feel about their photo being used, or how they feel about a photo of themselves being uploaded. If a fan has passed on, reach out to their family or friends.

If you do not know them personally, then consider the context where the photo was taken and how widely it was distributed. Has it already been posted online? Was this a large public convention or small private event? Was this published in a fanzine, newsletter, newspaper or magazine? Consider whether the photo is being used to document a group activity or being used to identify a specific person.

If you are concerned about identifying individuals, one option is to upload a smaller or lower-resolution photo, or elect to not identify specific people (refer to them as "a fan" or "fans") unless it is necessary for the photo's purpose. Also, please keep Fanlore's Fair Use Policy in mind when uploading images you do not own.

If you would like to get more guidance on a photo you are planning to upload, please contact the Fanlore Committee, selecting the subject 'Editing help' from the menu. If you are concerned about a photograph on Fanlore that features you, please use the contact form to get in touch, selecting the subject 'Identity Protection' from the menu.

Linking to photos, as long as the photograph is public, is permitted and can be an alternative if you are unsure about uploading a photograph to Fanlore.

Comments

[cathexys]

As so often, the desire to archive our past and the individual's right to be forgotten are at odds here. As we are "by fans, for fans," it seems pretty obvious that the needs of the fan exceed the desire to keep an account, especially given that we are getting into doxxing territory here.

My main question would be what purpose the images might serve and whether any of those purposes would be hindered when blurring faces. The main argument I'm seeing for uploading pics seems to be cosplay, and the costumes are mostly just as visible even if faces are blurred.

We don't even have images of our OTW board who all serve under RL names and in their public personae. Why would we want to upload pics that are private or taken from places with minimal circulation? The lines are too fine and the risks too great to permit such a policy!

[morgandawn]

I think there are other reasons to have photos of fans at convention events and other events besides cosplay. My favorite one is a historical photo of fans protesting the cancellation of the TV show Star Trek in the 1960s. It appeared in print media and was unique in that it showed how well-organized the fan community was even when the show was on the air before Star Trek became the Juggernaut that it now is

other historical examples in smaller settings include fans gathering for traditional activities like operating a mimeograph machine,comb binding fanzines, editing with pencils and later whiteout, typing on typewriters, fundraising events to raise money to put on their own convention, filking, operating VCRs in convention dubbing rooms, dealers rooms at conventions, performing fan plays

in the 1970's, the early Star Trek conventions, the informal mingling of the actors with fans, versus how fans now interact with the actors is another example

Fans who were showcased by name in convention program guides in the 70s and 80s illustrate the rise and prominence of the fan community in traditional media spaces. Fans have now begun to appear on panels at these conventions.

Most of my focus has been on images that appear in print media, but I can easily extrapolate some of these concepts to current online fan activities.

Ex, at political protests, fans have integrated their fandom selves into the political arena. When I marched in one of the women's marches, I wore a placard that referenced "tin plated dictators with delusions of godhood". Many of the fans who participated in protests co-opted imagery from Star wars.

In most instances, I think blurring the face would suffice to illustrate these concepts, except of course when the image is being used to identify the fan for a specific purpose.

The irony is there are very few historical photographs of fans at all & those are mostly BNFs in very public venues, such as Bjo Trimble and Jacqueline Lichtenberg, and fans in high visibility large con program books.

And because there are historically so few images preseved, we've never had to have a fan image policy. It is only with the proliferation of people taking photos of themselves and each other and posting them online, without any expectation of privacy, that this has now become an issue that we need to address. We have already voted with our "feet" and marched into the future of Tik Tok videos and endless Twitter and Instagrams posts. So it is good to start to thinking about how we want preserve our history in this uncomfortably public environment

[fiachairecht]

We have already voted with our "feet" and marched into the future of Tik Tok videos and endless Twitter and Instagrams posts.
Speak for yourself, plenty of people's votes were 'Absolutely not' to all of those or 'well, I GUESS' to a very locked, very non-fannish one of those.

Like I and other people have said many places in this thread, your assumption that just because an image appears somewhere else means it's appropriate to put it on Fanlore is misguided and, in some places, verging on being if not already literally contra the law

[vaznetti]

One thing that strikes me in this regard, and in the examples provided by you below, is that there has been over time a change in the way in which fans adopted pseudonymity between the period of in-print zines and the internet age. I have work in print zines from the late 1980s and early 1990s under my legal name, and many of the women in the pictures you provide below will have probably done the same. And indeed my first forays into fandom on the internet were also carried out under my legal name -- in those days one often got an email via one's school, for example, and the kind of services which allowed you to get a second one were still coming into existence. Within a few years I had adopted an early version of the pseud I currently use, as it became normal for people to sever the connection between their fannish activites and their other online activities. I think it may be the case now that the internet cultures among many groups have shifted away from pseudonymity -- but for many people involved in the history of fandom in the internet era it remains a strongly held ideal. I don't think that it would be historically sensitive to paper over that norm in an attempt to "skip" from two very different less-pseudonymous cultures.

Material in those early days was less widely distributed, and distributed in different ways. I remember the days of zines with different editions for gen or low-rated het material, explicit het material, and any form of slash. Being a Star Trek fan was not strongly associated with being a producer or consumer of pornography. Fanfiction, and the culture which surrounds it, has changed a great deal over this time -- as has the internet. The searchability of images, of face-recognitions software, etc. does I think mean that people are right to be more cautious of the ways in which their own images and the images of others are distributed. The concerns of individuals photographed in the (say) 1980s and 1990s -- a period when I was certainly attending cons and being photographed -- will necessarily have changed to reflect the changed ways in which that material is now able to be disseminated. This is in itself a part of our history.

[ratcreature]

This. At first on the early mailing lists I participated under my RL name, but with the shift to blogs and then LJ I switched to using a pseud because I did not want search engines for my RL name to give as first result the fandom stuff, since then I was still at university and had no idea whether I wanted to pursue a professional path where you might not want the first google results be your thoughts on porn. Also, associations between pseud and RL names aren't necessarily bi-directional, i.e. I never minded fans knowing my RL name, it's the reverse lookup I've always been more wary of.

[kore]

THIS THIS THIS

(When I first posted to Usenet about fannish stuff I had a college account, exactly.)

[(Anonymous)]

We have already voted with our "feet" and marched into the future of Tik Tok videos and endless Twitter and Instagrams posts.

Who's we, kemosabe?

[(Anonymous)]

God, will you shut up, man?

My right not to be hunted down on the internet and harassed >>>>>>>>> your desire to have everything recorded.

[myrdschaem]

As I noted up thread, some of us live in countries where they can sue people for this and people posting willy-nilly are subject to fines or even jail. One current behavioural standard in one North American cultural internet corner does not extend internationally or even everywhere on the internet.

[dhampyresa]

Most of my focus has been on images that appear in print media, but I can easily extrapolate some of these concepts to current online fan activities.

I do not think these situations are analogous. Even the most widely read print media has limited reach compared to the internet and while physical media may be entirely lost/destroyed (the lost Doctor Who episodes are an example among many) due to the fact that the amount of copies is finite, once something is up on the internet the genie cannot go back into the bottle because an infinite number of copies exist.

Some fans went to Tiktok/twitter/instagram/etc, others have not. Additionally I find "without any expectation of privacy" to be a bad faith argument. What people do to themselves does not authorise others to do those things to them; if I facepalm, that doesn't mean I'd be okay with some rando slapping me.

[(Anonymous)]

>We have already voted with our "feet" and marched into the future of Tik Tok videos and endless Twitter and Instagrams posts. So it is good to start to thinking about how we want preserve our history in this uncomfortably public environment <

But some of us didn't? Speaking for myself, as things started to get more public I locked down my DW and never really made the jump to Tumblr precisely because it didn't have a lock feature. I'd attended a few small cons in the past; I probably won't in the future, and part of it is because the fannish culture on privacy has changed over time. And the thought that someone could be browsing through Fanlore--a colleague, say--and come across a photo of me with a pseud from a con I attended years ago and then blurt that out at work--"Oh, hey, stumbled across your pseud, read all your fanfic over the weekend!" (because that person might be a-okay with being openly fannish and not realize others aren't) makes me tense and unhappy. And that's not even a worse case scenario!

And if people have dropped out of fandom, they're the people who are least likely to be contacted, right? Say Fan A has a photo of themselves with seven or eight fellow fans doing cosplay from 2002. They've kept in touch with everyone but one, because that person drifted away from fandom. They put the photo up to demonstrate cosplay, figuring it was at a con, so why not? But the person who drifted away is the least likely to know about or be following Fanlore, and to be sideswiped when someone who does know them reaches out to them about it. And that person could have had any number of reasons for drifting away from fandom, but one of them might well have been because of the increasing public profile of fandom.

[fanloremod]

Thank you for the input and thoughts. We realise that the original proposed text of the policy would not have been at all sufficient to protect fans' privacy and identity. We fully acknowledge that it was not in line with what fandom would have expected from Fanlore and our commitment to protecting fans' identities, and we sincerely apologise for this.

We will take all of the concerns expressed on board and work to produce a policy that is much more robust in protecting fans, and will share the next version for feedback as soon as we are able.