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Joe,

As in everything to do with legal rights it can get complex.

Most wedding photographers keep the copyright to their photos, wven thougj they were works for hire, so they can use them in their portfolios and to promote their businesses. Aside from copyright there are privacy rights for non-public persons that can vary greatly from state to state. Most professional.photographers, other than photojournalists, get models releases from their subjects. This may ot may not be done for weddings (it depends on their contracts) and even if the couple signs a release they cannot sign away the privacy rights for everyone else at the wedding. A fuller explanation is in the link below.

Important factors are whether the photos are being used commercially for profit or in an offensive or embarassing manner. So for most museums those are non issues.

While best practice is to contact the people in the photos to ask permission to make them public, often many wedding photographers post them online or in printed materials and if someone complains then they take them down. That sounds like a reasonable policy.

https://www.quora.com/Do-I-have-any-rights-to-photos-taken-of-me-at-someones-wedding

Cheers!

Dave

David Harvey

Senior Conservator & Museum Consultant

Los Angeles CA. USA

www.cityofangelsconservation.weebly.com

On Fri, Apr 27, 2018, 8:13 AM Joe Hoover <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

I had an interesting situation posed by a small historical society that recently received a large cache of wedding and school photos from the local town photographer (20,000+). The photographer owns the copyright (at least of the wedding photos) and has given the photos AND copyright to the historical society. The historical society is talking about wanting to post these online. While copyright might be clear I am not sure about legal rights of privacy of the subject and the ethics of publishing online the photos of weddings which is an intimate affair in a private space (usually). Additionally, the photographer retired in the 2000s so many of these are quite contemporary. Consent is usually needed for publishing a photograph of an identifiable individual taken in a private place. Also, many people don't realize that often wedding photographers maintain the copyright, and be shocked to find that a historical society now "owns" them and that the public has access to them.

I see a lot of historical organizations publishing wedding and school photos online - though many are nearly over 50 years old, but still I wonder what discussions on the right to privacy have done with posting photos under 70 years old (it is assumed that most people in the photo would have passed on after 70 years thus not having a right to privacy) have been done? I know there have been many conversations on the Right of Privacy on crime scene photos, but I don't know of any discussions of the Right of Privacy and wedding and school portraits.

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