The Right Not to Be Looked At

Abstract

In 1953, Life magazine sent its world-renowned photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White into the mountains of Mesoamerica, where her drive to take pictures collided with a poor man’s desire not to be photographed. Examining this destitute man’s assertion of his right to be let alone, I argue that recent theorizations of “the civil contract of photography” and “the right to look” need to be tempered with what is at once a more old fashioned defense of the right to privacy and an utterly pressing contemporary concern with electronic intrusions into our lives by governments and businesses.