Dear Careforce,
Please read the following, and use the form at the bottom to express your preference for how you would like to be included, or not, in photographs.

Background: Documenting a remarkable time
As we’ve lived through the last two years with Hanna and with one another, it’s clear that this is a remarkable experience of care, community, life and death. Because it’s remarkable, a question keeps popping up: how might we pass this on to others?

The desire to capture and tell the story of Hanna and Careforce has been growing all along, and now more things are happening. Hanna continues to write. Lizzie is writing a manual-type piece about caring for our dying. Marc has ideas about “participatory authorship” of the Careforce story. Many people have been taking pictures. Now Maranie is making photographs.

The final form of this writing and image-making is still to be seen. Some of us have made little collections of photographs, but most remain in our separate phones and hard drives. For the most part all the “documentation” of our collective story has been (beautifully!) in-the-moment.

Why this?
It’s Maranie’s work that has sparked this note and this request. As she has become more a part of life at the Oasis, as her camera has become more present, it’s clear that we each have different understanding and feelings about being photographed.

The form below is a response to a need for clarity. For each of us, clarity about Maranie’s work and how we can opt in or out of being included in the photographs. For Maranie, that clarity helps her feel sure and safe in the moment that she and her work are a welcome part of our culture.

A quote from Hanna during a conversation about this: “We are building culture.” This is something new in our culture. Most of us have not experienced something like it. This is a step toward enlarging our culture to include documentation and photography while continuing its power as a place of belonging and becoming for us all.

How Maranie’s photographs have been used so far
For context, here’s Maranie’s web site, and here is her Instagram page. If you click on the Hanna-related photographs in Instagram (like this one for example) you’ll see that some of them contain multiple images (use the little arrows over the photograph for next and previous) and a bit of text. That text and those images make the entirety of one of Maranie’s newsletter posts, which are emailed to her subscribers and sometimes also posted to Facebook.

As of January 2025, “share publicly” means sharing on social media accounts such as Instagram, Facebook, and email newsletters. There may be other uses of these photographs in the future, such as in a published book. For those, whoever is producing that work will seek permission separately. This is not an “all rights forever” consent.

* A note: you can still say “not now please”

If you consent to being photographed, there may still be moments when you’d rather say no. Maranie is open and sensitive to those moments (as we all need to be with our phone cameras). So can we agree that…

1. Consent can be suspended and reinstated
It’s always okay to say “Please don’t include me in photographs in this moment / situation / day.” And whoever the photographer is, we can expect them to respect this as a cultural norm.

2. Changes need to be explicit, and it’s always okay to check
Once that request is made, photography of that person / activity / situation remains suspended until there is an explicit conversation in which consent is restored. Things like,
“Okay, thank you, I’m cool with photographs again.”
Or, “I’d like to check with you—would you still prefer not to be photographed?”