Folsom Street Fair, the annual BSDM fair in San Francisco, upset photographers in 2016 with its Ask First campaign that asked photographers to receive permission before taking photos of people on the public streets of the fair. This year, the same event
organizers have released a warning that compares taking photos without consent to sexual assault. The PSA image , was uploaded by Folsom Street Events to the page for Up Your Alley , a leather and fetish street fair held yesterday on Folsom Street in
SF. It reads: Gear is not consent. Nudity is not consent. Ask first before photographing or touching someone. No means no. Folsom Street Events' street fairs are on public streets, and even though the streets are closed to traffic during the
events, the area is still a public place. On the flip side, nudity is prevalent during the extremely not safe for work street fairs, so it's a situation in which expectations of privacy collide with First Amendment rights to shoot photos in public places
without permission. Nathaniel Y. Downes , a freelance photojournalist who works for the San Francisco Chronicle commented: The more harmful thing is that somehow the story has put photography and sexual assault
in the same mouthful. No matter the intentions, this is not a positive direction for photography to be moving in the public eye. I have been to the fair a few times and have never taken pictures. But as a photographer, it hurts me
to think that some people see photography the same as sexual assault.
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