My evening outing today was to a seminar organised by IP advocacy group
Own-It and the
British Press Photography Association, devoted to addressing the issues surrounding the increasingly fraught activity of
public photography.
As was noted repeatedly there is
no law against photography in public, or indeed photographing someone
per se. However, there are other laws which can and have been used to inhibit photography.
Firstly, there are the legal restrictions on what you can do with pictures. For celebrities and especially their children there are privacy concerns, whilst where there is an exclusive contract for photography (as happened in
Douglas v Hello) then unofficial photographs may be deemed invasive. In some countries, but not the UK, there may be limits on photographing buildings or public sculpture - France is particularly bad - whilst there has been a worrying trend for organisations like the Premier League to seek to control photographs on the basis that they include their logos.
The second sort of control is aimed at actual photography, with the latest and most disturbing example being the powers given under the recent Terrorism Acts. Apparently, many police forces view use of an SLR and telephoto lens as 'suspicious activity' and will stop and search accordingly. The most worrying thing though, according to several of the photographers present, was the growing public acceptance of the idea that photography is somehow an activity you have to be specifically authorised to do. This seems to be an instance of a wider attitudinal change towards thinking that the public are only allowed to do such activities as the law provides a specific named right to - the utter antithesis of the traditional Diceyan approach in English law that only that which the law prohibited was subject to legal control.
I hope I was able to persuade a few people with my argument that forced deletion of photographs is an offence against s.3 of the Computer Misuse Act - whether this will deter a grumpy policeman is another matter, mind you. Looking forward, I would like to think that photographers would have common cause with many cyberliberties activists, but unfortunately I suspect that the two groups will be strongly divided on the issue of copyright, which most professional photographers are strongly in favour of - as freelancers, licensing their work is what puts food on their plate. Meanwhile, we're left with the situation described by an experienced press photographer:
"When people asked what I did for a living and I said that I was a photographer, they used to say 'gosh, you must see some really interesting things'. Now they look at me as if I'm a child molester."Unless we can reverse such attitudes and reclaim the streets as a safe venue for cameras, we'll end up looking back at the slow death of real-life photography. Another photographer noted how more and more events had to be staged rather than photographed naturalistically, as it was the only way to satisfy all parties. Is this how we want to remember our times, as nothing but posed tableaux instead of candid snaps?
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ms_cataclysm and R. Holly stayed firmly hidden in bed but Trude consented to come out, and pictures of her are below the cut. More pictures, of Panda, later.
