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"You don’t need permission to publish photos of historical significance."That's insufficient for the sort of photography I mean. There is a tremendous amount of historical value provided in even shots of the mundane. Look up the works of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Garry Winogrand, Treng Parke, among many others - these are photographers who captured regular people, in regular situations, in daily life, and in doing so provide a valuable historical record decades later.
The historical record of a people is, IMO, not embodied in photographs of famous politicians and actors, but rather in regular people - and to disallow their photographing by default inhibits this. The concern isn't just historical, it's also artistic - if we disallowed photography of people without explicit model releases almost all of the photography in art museums today would not exist.
> "Or – and this can apply to street photography – if it serves a higher interest of the arts."
That's an incredibly vague - and conservative - angle on it. Street photography has traditionally pushed the boundaries of what society finds acceptable, and for the most part it is always vindicated over time. Most of the challenging, worthwhile street photography would not hit the "higher interest of the arts" bar at the time they are taken.
Your standard basically means that whatever is being done has been accepted by mainstream society already as a valuable art form. Now tell me, how much of new art is already accepted by society at large at the time of creation?
Take a look at, for example, the work of Bruce Gilden, whose working method is still controversial today, but I for one am glad he has the freedom to do it.
> "I think the general recommendation for street photographers is to make eye contact with who they photograph and check that way whether it’s ok. Also, walking up and talking to who you photographed isn’t super hard."
I do street photography almost every day. I know this - it's easy to get permission, it's hard to shove a piece of paper in someone's face and have them sign their legal rights away. The bar isn't "subjects should be consenting", it's "subjects should have signed a legally binding agreement". That is the part that is unreasonable.
> "As I already said, photographing without publishing is nearly always ok, so you can shoot first and get permission later."
You want to track a stranger on a street down later, put a legal agreement in front of them, and get them to sign it?
> "The right to privacy is one of the rights defined in the German constitution – but so is the freedom of the arts."
All around the world, almost universally, the protect of the "arts" extends only to what has already been deemed acceptable. Street photography still isn't recognized consistently as an art form, much less a protected one. Like I said before, to define acceptability as "worthwhile arts" merely protects what doesn't need protecting: art forms that mainstream society already finds palatable and desirable.