Tango Photos and the Law — What I Learned (So Far)

I am not a lawyer. This is what I learned about photos and the law — first in 2016, when I was shooting at marathons regularly, and again in 2019, when GDPR made everyone (including me) re-think the whole thing. If you are a lawyer, please comment if I got it right. If you are a photographer or an organizer, I hope this saves you the hour of googling I already spent.

The three rights that collide at a milonga

A tango photo is a small accident of three different people’s rights. Understand who holds what, and most “who may use this picture?” arguments dissolve.

The photographer. The person who presses the shutter owns the copyright to the picture. Full stop. When they upload it to Facebook, they grant Facebook the right to use it — and to let other users on the platform use it. Any watermark disclaimer saying “no reuse without permission” is invalid once it is uploaded there; Facebook’s terms overrule it. What those terms do not change is attribution, and they do not give anyone outside Facebook any rights at all.

The depicted dancers. The people in the picture have rights too — especially private persons. Public personae (maestros, well-known DJs) have less protection this way, and so does anyone photographed in a genuinely public space or at a public event. Anything non-public — and a milonga in a rented hall may well not be one — usually needs the permission of the subject. That is what stock photography sites call a model release: without it, you cannot sell the picture there.

The organizer. Here is the part nobody tells you: when pictures are used for advertisement — and at our events, money is almost always exchanged somewhere — that counts as commercial use. An organizer who wants a photographer’s picture for event promotion needs the photographer’s permission (that process is called licensing, usually for some €, sometimes for more €€ for exclusivity), and often the permission of the “models” in the picture as well.

So the same milonga photo can be fully legal to post on Facebook, fully not-yours-to-print in next year’s festival brochure, and fully removable at the depicted dancer’s request. Three rights, three answers.

What GDPR added (as I learned in 2019 — the regulation itself has applied since May 2018)

When GDPR arrived, it reached even the camera bag: taking photos of identifiable people is processing personal data (this is standard GDPR doctrine — see the UK IPO post). Does GDPR apply to people taking pictures? Yes — because they may want to share or publish the pictures — and no, if the pictures never leave the memory card.

The practical question is the lawful basis. A quick comparison of the options that matter to us:

Lawful basis	Works for photographers when…	Reality check
Consent	You can actually collect it from every depicted person	Most secure, most “pita” to get
Contract	You are the contracted photographer of an organizer	The consent duty shifts to the organizer — could be collected as part of the event registration
Vital interest	Someone’s life or health is at stake	Probably never applies (I guess) to closed/private events like marathons or encuentros; possibly at large public festivals

The contractual route is the elegant one: instead of a photographer chasing twenty strangers with consent forms between tandas, the organizer folds photo consent into the registration process for the photographer they hired. One conversation instead of fifty.

(There is a good plain-language write-up of the copyright + GDPR side for photographers on the UK IPO blog.)

What this means in practice

If you use someone else’s picture — for a tango maestro’s website, for an event announcement, anywhere with money attached — you need the photographer’s permission, and often the depicted persons’ too.

If you share or re-use a picture within Facebook, you are covered by the license Facebook obtained — but fairness says attribute the photographer, and common courtesy says ask first. Both cost you almost nothing.

If you see a picture of yourself and want it taken down: this is your right. Photographers — and I include myself here — you need to react accordingly, and quickly. An event photographer who argues about takedown requests is burning trust that took years of good dance photos to build.

And if you are shooting at events: check before you publish. The safest habit I know is to treat every closed-event hall as “consent required” and every public plaza as “check anyway”.

The trade-offs

This is all a balance between three goods that pull against each other: our wonderful culture of event photography (where would our memories be without it?), the dignity and privacy of the people in the pictures, and the legal reality that organizers operate in. Lean too far in any direction and you lose something — no photos, resentful dancers, or a nasty legal letter. Ymmv, and laws differ by country; what I describe here is what I learned for the German/EU context we mostly operate in.

Did I miss anything?

Abrazos, Daniel