Stanford University | Engaging Places

*Do I need permission to take photos of a guided tour in a museum?*

In the previous posts in this series, I looked at visitor codes of conduct, visitor photography policies, and commercial or media photography policies. Those policies are becoming more visible because photography is no longer a simple matter of “Can I take a picture?” A single image can be a personal memory, a social media post, a teaching tool, a scholarly document, a news illustration, a commercial asset, or evidence in a public debate.

This final post turns to the more complicated issues: fair use, copyright, photo releases, privacy, and ethics. As a reminder, I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. Museums should consult an attorney when writing policies involving copyright, image permissions, privacy, publicity rights, releases, commercial use, or contracts. My purpose here is to identify common points of confusion that arise when museums, visitors, writers, teachers, scholars, and photographers try to understand what permission is needed and from whom.

I encounter these questions in my own work. As someone who photographs museums and historic sites for this blog, teaching, consulting, and research, I occasionally wonder: should I ask permission from the museum before publishing a photograph of an exhibition? Do I need a model release if visitors appear in the background? Is it appropriate to photograph a historic house where people still live nearby? Does it matter if I am writing criticism, promoting the museum, or using the image in a paid presentation?

These questions are often confused with a different issue: what museums need to do when they use images of visitors for their own promotional purposes. A visitor taking a photograph in a gallery, a museum using a child’s image in a fundraising campaign, and a company filming a commercial in a sculpture garden are not the same thing. They raise different legal, ethical, and managerial questions. Policies should be clear enough that frontline staff can explain them without being expected to interpret copyright law, privacy law, or fair use on the spot.

Four Issues That Often Get Confused

Photography policies often blend several distinct issues:

Copyright: who owns the rights to the artwork, photograph, exhibition label, design, film, or other creative work that appears in the image?
Access: what conditions did the museum place on photography as part of admission, ticketing, visitor conduct, or use of its property?
Privacy and publicity: are identifiable people shown in the image, and is their likeness being used in a way that requires permission?
Ethics: even if a photograph is legally permissible, is it respectful, accurate, safe, and consistent with the museum’s values and the dignity of the people, places, and stories involved?

Continue reading →

In 2008, Stanford University introduced “Reading Like a Historian,” a non-traditional history curriculum to five schools in the San Francisco Unified School District. According to Sam Wineburg, who directs the Stanford History Education Group and has been a longtime proponent of revising the teaching of history, “We need to break the stranglehold of the textbook by introducing students to the variety of voices they encounter in the past through primary sources.” It seems this new curriculum is doing that and more, as recently reported in Futurity:

There are no orderly rows of desks in Valerie Ziegler’s 11th-grade history class—students sit in groups of three or four at small tables around the room. There also is no lectern because there are no lectures. And perhaps most striking, there are no textbooks.

These students at Abraham Lincoln High School in San Francisco learn about the Vietnam War, women’s suffrage, civil rights, the Great Depression, and other major events in U.S. history by analyzing journal writings, memoirs, speeches, songs, photographs, illustrations, and other documents of the era.

“I always tell my students they’re historians-in-training, so the work we do in here is that of a historian,” Ziegler says.

That sounds like fun, but does it have any impact? Continue reading →