If people don't want to be photographed in a bathing suit in a public place they have two options, don't wear the bathing suit or stay out of the public place. Very simple. Anything in a public place is fair game in the US, you put yourself out there you can be photographed.
I would submit that there's a profound difference, psychologically, between being seen and being photographed. People do many transient things as a part of their natural behavior that would make them extremely uncomfortable to see in a permanent record. As has been mentioned, this is a matter not so much of morality or legality, but of empathy. I think it's a bit glib to assert that people have only themselves to blame if they don't constrain their human natures to the purely rational.
Winogrand was famous for snapshotty pictures of women- perhaps this guy loves Winogrand. Perhaps he loves women. I can't find anything wrong here.
Finally! Someone who remembers Winogrand's book "Women Are Beautiful".
🙂 This was moderately controversial at the time (I think he had trouble getting it published). I'm fairly certain that Winogrand did not set out to do a project on women, but his natural tendencies resulted, over time, in a body of work on the subject. He probably took the vast majority of the picture simply because he found the women beautiful -- whether in the banal, bikini-clad sense or in some deeper, more empathetic sense.
What is "unsavory" about this??? Photographing the life on the street around you is NORMAL.
Correct. Only the photographer's intent potentially could be unsavory, and that cannot be divined with any certainty from the photographs alone. That having been said, I think it's worth considering that, from the point of view of the subjects of the pictures, the idea of having those photos available on the internet for all humanity to view, with whatever intent, may be somewhat more disturbing than the thought that some individual has, for whatever reason, seen fit to take and keep a snapshot of them.
So, in short, I think the possible "creepiness" of this collection of images lies not in their mere existence, but mostly in what they may represent about the shallowness of the relationship between the photographer, his subjects and (not incidentally) the viewers. This is something that all street and documentary photographers should think about seriously.
As an example, I once took a course in documentary photography where one of the exercises had the instructor randomly pairing up the students and assigning each pair to come to class the following week and display nude photos of each other. The objective was to teach us something about the vulnerability a subject experiences in front of the camera; the sensitivity the photographer should exercise behind the camera; and how empathy between the two results in much stronger images, even when those images are uncensored. (Also, viewing and critiquing such photos in the presence of both the photographer and the subject offered an unusual and valuable perspective on documentary photography.)
::Ari
