Täglicher Faschismus

London’s war on public photography has been a theme at Boing Boing for a while, and now they have a campaign to help one British MP defend innocent people for taking innocent pictures in the street. This shouldn’t, of course, be necessary: Taking pictures of things that happen in public is a normal freedom in the West. But since the “War on Terror” it has eroded because of paranoia about terrorists who take pictures of things; because of defensive cops worried about getting filmed while making arrests; and because of general police and rent-a-cop ignorance of what is and is not legal.

Alas, it’s not quite news that the War on Photography is alive and well in America, too.

But let’s be clear: The cops actually have no right, no power — none — to keep people from taking most of these photos. When police don’t know (or ignore) what’s legal or illegal, the rule of law is breaking down, and when the rule of law breaks down in the face of such a simple right, we’ve begun to get used to Täglicher Faschismus, everyday fascism — in particular when the same freedom is claimed by governments to put up cameras of their own.

     posted 15 April 2008 by Michael Scott Moore

  1. Absolutely agree. It’s sickening that street photography, initiated by the likes of Atget, Cartier-Bresson, Frank, Eggleston, etc., is being jeopardized by people who’ve been fed fear by the government. Also ironic that for over a century, street photography has been an iconoclastic force in art for and of everyday people, and it’s these average ‘rent-a-cop’ types who’re making it difficult for that kind of accessible art to survive.

    — rebecca    Apr 17, 07:37 pm    #

  2. There’s a PDF to download on photographers’ rights in the UK (and in Australia, and the US) here: http://www.sirimo.co.uk/ukpr.php

    The main message re. Britain seems to be: don’t take pictures of the army, of bombs, of telephones, or of banknotes.

    — d.z. bodenberg    Apr 19, 11:44 pm    #

  3. Telephones?

    — Mike    Apr 20, 01:30 am    #

  4. Under the Official Secrets Act 1911, it is prohihibited to take photographs of (amongst others) “any telecommunications office owned by a public telecommunications operator” “where this might be useful to an enemy”.

    Ok, so British Telecom was privatised in 1983, which means this law is slightly less relevant than it once might have been. So don’t take any photographs of telephone boxes or phone shops in the city of Kingston-upon-Hull, where, for historical reasons, the local authority has always run the phone service (and therefore is ‘a public telecommunicaions operator’) and continues to hold a monopoly.

    — d.z. bodenberg    Apr 22, 08:52 am    #

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