17 Feb 2009
Photographers' protest against Counter-Terrorism Act on video
Olivier Laurent
A reader sent this video of the photographers' gathering in front of New Scotland Yard on Monday 16 February. The author, Marco La Nave, followed other cameramen and was able to film the interviews Mark Thomas and other photojournalists gave to networks such as Sky News and the BBC. Very interesting video.
Comments
Hmm. Apparently terrorists do "reconnaissance photography" in preparation for an attack. By making this illegal we would make it harder for them to attack us.
Ok. Well I guess they would also place a few phone calls when planning an attack. Maybe send a few emails. Walk around the area. Perhaps have breakfast on the morning of the attack. If we make those things illegal too, perhaps we'll finally be safe!!
Hate to dig up that same old quote again, but...
"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin
It was a great turnout on the day. Well worth the trip up to London. I photographed a lot of photographers with a stereo camera, so if you were rounded up by a blond guy with a big plastic beast that was me. Pics are on the URL http://www.geocities.com/mrab1500/scotyard.html
I'm not sure what good the demonstration has done, but we'll see next time there's a 'situation' and its enforcement is attempted.
........what we need now are test cases to establish exactly how the courts see how photojournalists/artists, etc have 'reasonable excuse for actions' as the act describes would be a 'defence' .
Would they for instance rule that a photographer shooting pictures of the police abusing an innocent person has a 'reasonable excuse'? it will be interesting to see how this is played out beyond the excuse the police now have to harass anyone with a camera they don't like the look of.
Blog roll
- 5b4
- 1000 Words Photography
- A Photo Editor
- A Visual Society
- BagNews
- BagNews (on Tumblr)
- Boston Globe's The Big Picture
- Conscientious
- Conscientious Redux (on Tumblr)
- Duckrabbit
- Foto8
- Food For Your Eyes
- Gawker
- Getty Images' Blog
- Here
- Hotshoe
- Institute for Artist Management
- Invisible Ph t grapher Asia
- Journalism.co.uk
- Lens at The New York Times
- Lens Culture
- Lightstalkers
- Los Angeles Times Photography
- Mastering Multimedia
- Mostly True
- No Caption Needed
- PDN Pulse
- Photo Magazine (France)
- Photojournalismlinks
- Prison Photography
- Prison Photography (on Tumblr)
- Resolve - The liveBooks Photo Blog
- Romenesko
- Rob Galbraith DPI
- Saatchi Online
- StockPhotoTalk
- Telephoto
- The 37th Frame
- The Big Picture
- The Daily Nice
- The Click
- The Online Photographer
- The Russian Photos Blog
- The Travel Photographer
- Vice Magazine
- Wall Street Journal's Photo Blog
- WarShooter
- What's the jackanory?

















