Photography is Not a Crime
The latest issue of JPG Magazine, a quarterly print magazine, is now available. This issue’s theme is Photography is Not a Crime:
There’s another example every day. An overactive security guard harassing a photographer on a public sidewalk. Cops intimidating people with cameras. Photography bans in subways. In a post 9/11 age of paranoia and suspicion, public photography is increasingly seen as threatening, or mistaken as criminal. And we here at JPG are sick of it.
So we devoted issue 5 to this important topic. The theme, “Photography is Not a Crime,” is a rallying cry. It’s meant to remind everyone that amateur photographers are the documentarians of real life. We capture our world to help us understand it. We are not a threat.
The issue contains 31 photographer’s takes and stories on the theme, NYC subway photography by Edmund Leveckis, Shane Lavalette’s Family Portrait Project, an interview with attorney Bert Krages, and a special clip-out Photographer’s Right Bust Card.
I mention this partly because the topic is important to those of us who try to photograph situations that some want undocumented. The first photo on JPG’s sample page, for example, shows an Israeli soldier at a checkpoint in Ramallah, where I also took photos last year, including this one of a soldier as he was beginning to single me out for taking photos I wasn’t supposed to take. Of course, I’d like to think photojournalism can indeed be a threat, but this might be wishful thinking.
But really I’m mentioning this JPG issue because it includes a photo of mine, and I want to brag. It’s this one, which I took as I was being thrown out of Boston’s Park Street subway station for taking photos the week of the 2004 Democratic National Convention. The flag, of course, makes it perfect.
You can see more of my 2004 DNC and RNC photos, and other political and more mundane topics, in my photo galleries.