important things

While I am searching through my unedited photos to select the next series I stumbled over this snapshot that shows a very important moment from my Switzerland-trip with Priscilla: signing the model release.

Even with close friends like Priscilla I need a written contract in which the model gives me the rights to publish the photos and videos I took of her. 

I had to learn this the hard way. In my younger years - even younger than I am right now :-) - I (also) used to photograph my girl friends, my adventures, closer friends... and it was always clear that I want to publish the photos one day. They all agreed. But I never asked them to sign a written model release.

This means that I will never be able to publish those sometimes wonderful photos that are not only pleasureful memories from my (love)life, but sometimes really carefully elaborated images. Those times, digital didn't even exist in the fantasy, all was on film. Prints were handmade, one by one, in the darkroom. If I had the rights, those images would for sure represent some value. If...

There were breathtakingly beautiful girls of 14, 15 years when I myself was 15, 16 years. There were girls in their youth of 17, 18, 19 years, that later became famous, one as a model, one as a progressive politician, one as a lawyer, one as a doctor. I especially remember the politician when she not yet was that hard woman who knows every trick in the book, but the sweet young girl, excited, wide open with the legs wide apart, happy on my unordered bed of my first flat (a single room with a shower, a toilet, and a small kitchen in a cupboard). I remember her so lively, because my later woman, mother of my children, was a friend of her and very, but very jealous.... 

Others I have completely forgotten and when I see a print in one of my archive boxes I cannot remember her name, but sometimes other details...

Sometimes I am kind of a slow thinking guy and so it took years until I realized that I need a contract. For my excuse I must also say, that those times "personality rights" weren't so strict as they are today and probably I could have published some photos with the agreement by word of mouth. But times have changed in so many ways.

My first contracts are worthless too, because I made very restricted agreements, like, for example, "for the book 'Daniel's first book'" - that was never published.

Only after I suffered many times the impossibility to publish, I finally asked a lawyer to write a model release for me with which the models sell me all their rights on the images and agree to publish them even in internet.

So, here you see the moment when, the last morning of our journey, there was a "business moment". But as it is Priscilla, even this moment didn't lack of pleasure :-)