Doing street style photography?

I am doing a project for an exhibition at the moment and I need to get photographs of young people out shopping. The subjects I am after are 18 to 24 in age. These images are for display as part of an art show. I don't expect this to be commercial work but the images may be shown again later as part of another exhibition or perhaps as part of my portfolio online.

Please could you advise me what I would need to do in terms of getting people who appear in the images to sign a release form? I will actually be stopping people in the street and asking them to pose breifly for me rather than snapping them on the sly so they will know they are being photographed.

Also I am currently a self employed artist and graduated a few years ago so am not a student at the moment or anything. Will the police question me if they see me stopping and photographing people or is this ok as long as I am polite and not making a pest of myself? I intend to do this on a busy shopping street in a large british town.

Any advice about this regarding procedure and legality would be really helpful!

Thank you!

This sounds sort of similar to the "100 strangers" project that seems quite popular.
You would need permission if you wanted to sell the images for use in advertising but would not need permission just to use them in your portfolio or exhibition.

boliston said:

This sounds sort of similar to the "100 strangers" project that seems quite popular.
You would need permission if you wanted to sell the images for use in advertising but would not need permission just to use them in your portfolio or exhibition.

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The is potential for a small book of my work at some point maybe in conjunction with the show (maybe) and some images might be repoduced there. If there is it would only be a tiny run and not for any personal profit just as an add on to the show. Would this be ok?

Thanks for your response!

shimada said:

The is potential for a small book of my work at some point maybe in conjunction with the show (maybe) and some images might be repoduced there. If there is it would only be a tiny run and not for any personal profit just as an add on to the show. Would this be ok?

Thanks for your response!

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There are quite a lot of books about street photography and it would have been almost impossible to get permission from every person who appears in this type of book.

I was watching a video by Martin Parr recently on Youtube where he mentioned that he would literally need a whole team of people to follow him about when ever he goes out shooting if this was the case. He did go on to mention that France has different rules on publishing street images in books and when shooting in France he did have people follow him getting permission from people he was shooting.

boliston said:

There are quite a lot of books about street photography and it would have been almost impossible to get permission from every person who appears in this type of book.

I was watching a video by Martin Parr recently on Youtube where he mentioned that he would literally need a whole team of people to follow him about when ever he goes out shooting if this was the case. He did go on to mention that France has different rules on publishing street images in books and when shooting in France he did have people follow him getting permission from people he was shooting.

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Well I must assume that if Martin Parr can get away with it in the UK without getting sued then I should probably get away with it considering that about 00000.1% the number of people who see his work will see mine. Still it is such an issue these days as to what is ok and what is not, seems like you can get in trouble for everything.

Thanks for the heads up on the 100 strangers project that is really helpful too!