A happy and inebriated couple playfully greet each other late at night on a Shinchon street.
With a mind to a recent discussion about Korean law and photography, I purposely chose this shot as opposed to several others like it because it happened to be the moment when the tension before them meeting and hugging is the highest, even as the woman's face is unclear due to motion blur as she walks quickly forward towards the man. Obviously, the man's face is obscured, making this the perfect kind of street photography shot that will not get you in trouble with the legal "right to one's face."
And as couples meeting late at night go (it was nearly 3AM), I am pretty careful with that kind of stuff, because I don't know if it's an illicit and dangerous liaison for them.
As for the popular question of whether I use Photoshop to blur out faces, the answer to that is a hearty "no" and "never, ever."
For me, fair game as a photographer is to use Photoshop as just that – a tool that digitally simulates what would have been done in traditional darkrooms, which is lighten and darken, slightly increase and decrease both saturation and contrast (when exporting to JPEG from a raw PSD, you lose a lot of color saturation, so I bump it up to compensate, and when I was upping photos for Seoul Selection's newsletter way back in the day, I purposely pushed sharpness and saturation a bit over the edge to degrade the picture enough to prevent them from looking good if printed), and crop. I don't blur out faces, add zoom effects, or otherwise mess with the actual content of the picture.
A lot of Korean photographers don't take the line between street/documentary photography and other kinds of commercial and art photography as seriously as in the West; you don't repose, set up, or fundamentally alter any photographs, period.
Still, sometimes Koreans push me even more and ask, "Well, how can you know? How do I know you didn't change something?"
Well, it's a matter of trust. By photojournalism standards in the west, the assumption is that sources are real, quotes are double-checked, and photos that are presented as reportage are unsullied; and if you've faked a story or used the clone tool in Photoshop to touch even the tiniest element in a story, you will be blackballed from the field for life.
Your career will be over, as it well should be, because it corrodes the trust required in the general public to allow our work to have meaning. And given the many scandals and fakery that's taken place on a large scale in Korea over recent years, as well as the practice of messing with picture elements being so common, I am not surprised – albeit disappointed – that Koreans are so suspicious of photographs as documents of apparent truth.
Truly, truly unfortunate.