Who Owns The Rights To Their Image?

A French court has ordered photographer Yan Morvan to withdraw his photobook Gangs Story from bookstores and to pay a €5000 fine after it found that he had breached one of his subjects’ right to control his own image……..

Mathieu, whose full name has been withheld, brought a second lawsuit against the photographer and his publisher, claiming that the photograph didn’t represent his current beliefs and that he should own the rights to his own image. The court found in his favour, ordering the photographer to pay a €5000 fine and the book publisher to withdraw the book immediately……..

“Basically, in this case, two opposing rights were pitted against one another – the right to control your own image and the right to inform,” Morvan tells BJP in a phone interview. “In this case, the right to control your own image, which was introduced by French minister Elisabeth Guigou in 2000, won over the right to inform. There are 250 images in this book, what this sentence means is that 250 people could sue me. In essence, this sentence is a ban on a photographer’s right to work.”…….

Read all of this interview here

Gangs Story by Yan Morvan, published by La Manufacture de Livres
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