By Brian McDermott: At first, Brittany Cantarella had no idea the man she accidentally swiped with her Chevrolet was named Lord Jesus Christ. But within two days, the minor traffic incident had gone viral. Reporters snatched the then 20-year-old's Facebook profile picture and left messages on her grandmother's answering machine. "It's the girl that hit Jesus!" a man in Stop & Shop yelled.
"I wanted to hide, I wanted to run, I wanted to go far away," Cantarella said.
Two months later, she was willing to talk to me about the accident at a coffee shop in western Massachusetts. She was resolute, though, that I not take her picture or shoot video. That's because Cantarella's experience with viral fame made her wary of having her image wedded to a traffic accident that would never go away online.
This small anecdote is part of a new media conundrum dogging the relationship between visual journalists and their subjects: most people happily publish their own picture online, but a growing number of them are becoming wary of having their image captured by visual journalists.
With facial recognition software becoming commercially available in the past few years, new technologies could further reshuffle the relationship between a subject and a visual journalist.
Ed Kashi is a renowned photojournalist who has spent the past 30 years shooting for National Geographic, the VII Photo Agency and dozens of other outlets. And, he told me in an email interview, he's noticed individuals and organizations becoming more reluctant to allow visual access.
"There is more wariness and a desire to have more control over access and what you are allowed to show," he said. "In some cases and with certain subjects, this new paradigm presents a dilemma and can halt worthy work."