Club photography: How nightclub photos are becoming a Kenyan nightmare

There you are, unwinding, enjoying the sights and sounds after a long day on the rat race.

The music is loud, the DJ is playing all your favourite tunes, the waiters keep the drinks flowing and your stresses will have to wait until you wake up the next day.

But come morning and you are awakened by notifications from near and far, your photo is going viral on WhatsApp groups.

Photo? You wonder as you revive your phone and try to control your head which now weighs a tonne. The night was really good.

There you are, perfect lighting, face screwed up like you having hot flashes (shoutout to Eve and Gwen Stefani), in front of you is a person - known or unknown to you - and from the photo is scandalous.

Who? Why? How? You ask as your try to quell the storm at home and away. Welcome to the world of club photography.

Lately, most nightclubs, from Nairobi to Kisumu to Mombasa, have been hiring professional photographers whose core business is to take photos of revelers having a good time for the sake of later publication on the club's respective social media profiles.

The main purpose of nightclub photography is to; boost the club's visibility online, sell the club's agenda, attract clientele, act as the club's activity archive and basically fill up the club's social media timeline.

But as the trend continues to gather steam and more and more nightclubs continue to plaster their social media accounts with the previous night’s club activity, more revelers are starting to feel jittery about the whole situation. Many more club-goers are now going online to express their displeasure with having their photos paraded on either Facebook or Instagram for the whole world to gawk at.

"I found myself on the Instagram pages of a famous club in Westlands. I was in the company of my girlfriend and we were basically minding our business. We didn't even asked to be photographed or even posed for any photos. I was rudely accosted by my wife following morning after she saw photos of me and my girlfriend enjoying our 12-year old Glenfidich with her arms allover me. My marriage almost irretrievably broke down," Martin Nyaga* (not his real name) told Citizen Digital.

More and more men, especially married men (and women, though not as much) leading private lives, have expressed their displeasure with having their photos taken in the clubs they patronise and then published on social media the following day.

"You could be having a good time in a packed nightclub in Kilimani or wherever. Your wife even thinks you're out of town for business and then boom, your photos with your other woman are splashed across Instagram the following morning. I don't get it at all," James Kanyi says.

Paul Ace, a renowned club photographer at Memphis Lounge, chimed in saying.

"As for me, I will always ask a patron for permission before I take a photo of them. I always approach them first and ask for their consent. There are times, obviously, I've been in trouble for sharing photos of people who sought privacy and we solved the matter amicably. It never gets ugly. But the rule is to always ask for permission first.”

Lewee Kimani, DJ Kym Nickdee's official nightclub photographer, agrees with Paul saying," It's true. You always need to ask for permission first. We always do that. Maybe other photographers go around clicking away at their cameras randomly photographing anyone and everyone and that's plain wrong. You need these people to come back to the club tomorrow and doing so is simply chasing them away.”

Lewee also admits to have been in the wrong end of photography publication online and that, just like in Paul's case, these matters are normally sorted out promptly and amicably.

"I have never been threatened with a lawsuit by an aggrieved client. They always call us, ask us to kindly pull down the photos and we always do, all the time. It's a matter of having a gentleman's agreement. No need for antagonism. If a client doesn't want their photo online, then that's that. We simply pull it down and apologise,” he says.

Dickson Matata, Whiskey River's Head of Marketing, agrees that while photos should be promptly pulled down to save the face of the patron, caution should always be exercised nonetheless.

"Here at Whiskey River, I cannot remember the last time we were in trouble for publishing photos whose subjects had not consented to. We exercise huge caution when it comes to sharing photos online and, in most cases, you will see that we share more photos of women than men. We know how tricky these things can be and always sift out the photos before they land on our social pages. Our aim is to retain the clients and we are in no way interested in annoying them in any way," says Matata.

According to a top city attorney, a client has all the sufficient reasons to sue a club for having their photos published without their consent.

"You are totally right to sue. Absolutely. Incase you feel like photos of you were published without your consent and you have been unable to ask the club to pull them down, then that's sufficient grounds for litigation. Basically, your right to privacy was infringed upon," laywer Gachie Mwanza says.

"Article 31 of the Constitution protects the rights of an individual to his or her privacy, and Article 31(c) protects an individual's information relating to family or private affairs unnecessarily required or revealed, so a club has no right to post your photos on social media without your consent, not unless, of course, you can clearly be seen to have posed for the photos, both you and your partner or the club management can prove without reasonable doubt that you asked to be photographed yourself, " he adds.

The matter has generated a heated, albeit hilarious, conversation on Twitter on what is the actual purpose of club photography and if the revelers photos need to even be posted online in the first place.

Enock Bett (@ThisIsBett) sparked off the flames with his tweet, 'stop this club photography nonsense' accompanied with a photo of a young man cradling an obviously elderly woman.

The tweet has garnered over 3,000 likes and a combined 800+ in Retweets and reactions.