The seen-photograph standard
Beyond every local law sits one portable test: behave as if the person will see the photograph, because increasingly they will. If the frame would require an apology, it required a permission. If the caption would embarrass you read aloud to the subject, the picture has a problem the edit can't fix.
This standard travels to every jurisdiction and survives every legal variation, which is why it's our house rule on every workshop.
Asking is a skill, not an obstacle
The fear that asking kills the picture is mostly backwards: the photographs that follow a yes are better — closer, longer, returned to. Learn the ask in gesture (camera lifted slightly, eyebrows up) and in phrase ('may I make your portrait?' opens more doors in bad pronunciation than a telephoto opens at fifty metres), and accept refusals so gracefully that the next photographer inherits goodwill.
The candid tradition remains legitimate in genuinely public theatre — but the closer the frame comes to one person's face, dignity, or livelihood, the more the ask is owed.
Payment, printed and plain
Where photography has a local economy — the tannery worker, the market portrait, the festival access — pay it without resentment: their time has value and your budget acknowledges every other cost. What corrupts isn't payment but performance: paying people to enact a life they no longer live, then captioning it as found.
The better currency, where time allows, is the returned print. It converts subjects into collaborators, opens the same door twice, and leaves the place better documented for its own people.
Poverty is not a backdrop
The hardest working rule: hardship photographs easily and means cheaply. Before the shutter, the questions — does this frame give its subject a name, a context, or agency? Would the picture survive its subject's own reading? — and after it, the caption that does the work the frame can't.
Nothing here forbids photographing difficulty; the documentary tradition exists because difficulty must be seen. It forbids collecting it.
Sacred means no
Every photographic culture has rooms where cameras don't go — the interior at Chamula, the ceremony's inner circle, the mourning that tolerates witnesses but not lenses — and the signage is not always printed. The working rule: where the answer is unclear, the camera stays down and the question gets asked; where the answer is no, no is complete.
The pictures you don't take are part of your body of work. The places that welcome photographers next year are the ones this year's photographers respected.