Obliged to Spy Blog for this link, to PhotographerNotATerrorist.org, who have loads of neat kit and downloadable campaign posters. Anyone who knows the safe end of a camera from the naughty one (and, having spent a lifetime with the things and ‘repaired’ a number of ‘camera faults’ clearly resulting from a lack of this arcane knowledge, I am here to tell you that such searching technical insights are by no means universal) ought to have a look at it.

A recent clarification of the legal status of photgraphy, from the Metropolitan Police, via The Register. I quote:

Members of the public and the media do not need a permit to film or photograph in public places and police have no power to stop them filming or photographing incidents or police personnel.

I am obliged, as I suppose most photographers will be, to the Met for this, and can only hope that their officers (and those of other Forces) take it on board.

What is disagreeable is that the wretched closed-shop artists of the NUJ are clearly still trying to establish a legal difference between the photographic activities of NUJ members and those of everyone else, and that the Met appear to have taken this on board:

Genuine members of the media carry identification, for instance the UK Press Card, which they will present on request.

and

…where it is clear that the person being searched is a journalist, officers should exercise caution before viewing images as images acquired or created for the purposes of journalism may constitute journalistic material and should not be viewed without a Court Order.

Why should there be any legal difference between a professional journalist, an amateur journalist, and a member of the public who happens to own a camera?

I have suggested before that the NUJ would find it rather convenient if the police were to enforce their closed shop for them, and this does nothing to alter that view.

A certain amount of sentiment being expressed this morning (e.g. here and here) about the demise of Kodachrome.

My own collection of Pentaxes and their lenses started in 1968 and now fills several flightcases. I have been at it that long and I have to say I shan’t miss Kodachrome at all.

Kodachrome was awful. Quite apart from its being just about Kodak’s finest film-sales racket (their paid-process arrangement was challenged by the US government and banned there, but not elsewhere), it was notoriously inaccurate, having (allegedly) been designed, like much of Kodak’s stuff, to exploit the holiday-snap market. All the colours were oversaturated, the purpose of which being to make the sky look bluer, the grass greener and one’s tan somewhat tannier.

High Speed Ektachrome, at 400ASA, easy to process and, if properly exposed, far less mendacious, was always in my view a better bet for my sort of work (I briefly experimented with GAF/Ansco 500, but it was already being discontinued before I made much of it).

One cannot help but wonder how Kodak will survive the collapse of their self-made market. To be quite honest, having, during a lifetime of being involved one way or another with photography, rather endured than enjoyed their commercial provisions, I’m not at all sure that I’d miss them either.

Obliged to Bishop Hill for reference to this, which is a defiance of the supposed law against photographing the police.

I am rather more taken with the American approach, found on Boing Boing. If the police are going to harrass photographers using made-up laws, why not fob ‘em off with a made-up ‘photography permit’?

Time someone designed the UK equivalent of this.

The British Journal of Photography once again quotes Mr. Jeremy Dear, general secretary of the NUJ, in terms which make it difficult to avoid the conclusion that NUJ policy is that it is perfectly acceptable for the police to persecute photographers in general, provided that they wave through with a polite salute members of his union who display their press cards.

One cannot help but remember the Guild of Soviet Writers in this unhappy context.

The British Journal of Photography quotes a Mr. Jeremy Dear of the NUJ as saying:

‘Professional journalists carrying the press card should be free to work without harassment and intimidation.’

Unlike amateurs without press cards, Mr. Dear?

A closed shop, enforced by the police. Every union leader’s wet dream.

These guys are not on our side.

I am obliged to The Lone Voice for reference to this item from Urban75. It is a guide to what photographers are legally allowed to do.

However, despite what the law says, this sort of thing is still happening, and the response in some circles to police being inconvenienced by the publication of footage of their behaviour suggests that it’s going to keep on happening.

One of the curious aspects of this concerns the controversial Google Street View concern, which sends camera cars along public roads (quite legally) to photograph everything and everyone.

Questions arising from this activity include:

Why, when a Google car photographs a school, does not a ravening mob of Sun-reading parents, apparently happy to be forbidden to photograph their own children and to pay schools substantial sums (plus VAT) to do the job for them, crucify its driver and set it alight, with cries of “Paedophile!”?

Why, when a Google car photographs any one of the dozens of ’security subjects’ which are forbidden to us mere mortals, is it not seized and its pictures erased?

Why, when a Google car photographs a police officer, is its driver not harrassed and intimidated?

What use will be made of Google car photographs of everyone’s house by local authorities, as evidence to justify obtaining yet more non-council-tax income by fining people for petty technical infractions of various kinds (planning laws, bincrime, having a scruffy front garden, etc. etc.)?

What use will be made of Google car photographs (which appear to be capable of resolving both faces and vehicle index numbers) by the police?

What other relationship, if any, exists between this foreign corporation (which apparently feels itself obliged to declare publicly that it is ‘not evil’) and the British state?

Of course, what Google are doing is perfectly legal. They take pictures only from public highways, and are allowed to do so. As, in theory, are we. It’s just that if we actually try doing it we get into some kind of trouble.

So the photographers’ freedoms outlined by Urban75 appear to apply only to Messrs. Google, and not to ourselves. One cannot help but wonder why.

In the words of the great Sir Arthur C. Clarke:

“I have a bad feeling about this.”
“You do, huh?”
“Yup.”
[2001]

A letter in the British Journal of Photography:

[Photographers] were … charged by the five rows of riot police, beaten and trampled on… The police held us captive for seven hours, and if you were a freelancer and did not have a method of wiring your images out, your shots would have been on (stuck on memory cards) for many hours. I’m sure this is part of the police’s ‘kettling’ strategy to delay the flow of images to the world. I witnessed foreign news crews begging the police to let them out… Over the seven hours we could get no food or water or use of a toilet… I saw a photographer attacked by the police with the same ferocity as demonstrators who had provoked them. I saw one Canon body and lens smashed to pieces when the lensman was pushed to the ground by police. Of the 3000+ people detained for seven hours, I estimate that 100 to 200 wanted to fight the police, and half the remaining were media.

It seems to be clear that the police regarded photographers of this event as more of a ‘threat’ than the violent demonstrators who caused it.

Coincidence?

Hardly.

Secret policing; nothing to hide, nothing to fear

The Parliamentary Joint Select Committee on Human Rights {sigh}, quoted by the British Journal of Photography:

[It] is unacceptable that individual journalists are left with no option but to take court action against officers who unlawfully interfere with their work. Journalists have the right to carry out their lawful business and report the way in which demonstrations are handled by the police without state interference, unless such interference is necessary and proportionate, and journalists need to be confident that they can carry out their role. The public in turn have the right to impart and receive information: the media are the eyes and ears of the public, helping to ensure that the police are accountable to the people they serve. Effective training of front line police officers on the role of journalists in protests is vital. Police forces should consider how to ensure their officers follow the media guidelines which have been agreed between ACPO and the NUJ, and take steps to deal with officers who do not follow them.

This’ll have to be left on ’spin’ for at least half an hour.

[A sign on the northern Soviet border, c. 1975]

Regular readers will be aware that I am firmly of the opinion that any company which finds it necessary to claim that it is not evil is, in fact, evil, and that therefore I do not do any business with Messrs. Google, nor use any of their services. What I know about their Street View service is therefore merely what I read.

The Independent reports that

Google was forced to remove photographs of naked children from its Street View service last night as a row over internet privacy escalated into one about public safety…In a fresh twist, the Metropolitan Police denied claims by Google that it had been consulted about Street View prior to its launch. A spokesman for Scotland Yard said: “We have not been involved in discussions with Google regarding their product development.”… The company’s discomfort was compounded by a former criminal, Michael Fraser, who wrote in The Sun yesterday that Street View was a “gift to criminals”. Germans in the country’s northern state of Schleswig-Holstein are threatening to take legal action against Google … Google’s spokesman for northern Europe claims, however, that Germany’s streets are public property and that the concern does not need a permit to take pictures.

Regular readers will also be aware that I was at one time a professional photographer, and have rather strong views about the freedom of the individual to take photographs in public places.

My opinion of Google is a very low one and I would not be at all surprised to discover that the company which made its name in the internet world by pandering to the censorship imposed by the Communist tyrants of China is now involved in some kind of antilibertarian shenanigans with western governments.

Nostradunderclass predicts: Google will make what appears to be an embarrassing climb-down, and will apologise left and right, and do all sorts of technical stuff, and will publicly accept that anyone, even a huge American corporation, that wants to take photographs in public places in Europe needs to have a permit of some kind to do so. And so it will be. Mysteriously, Google will not appear to suffer any financial loss as a result of this procedure, and will in due course be given permits as required, local objections being over-ruled, possibly by the EU.

Leaving all other photographers throughout Europe to face the sort of totalitarian restrictions for which the Soviet Union was once notorious. Resulting, perhaps, in the estate agents mentioned in the article finding it less hassle to buy their property photos from Google rather than go through the expensive mill of obtaining a permit to take them themselves.