Media and the Police

Often we hear about journalists and photographers in the media in a bad light. Photojournalists are often accussed of invading people’s privacy and stalking/hounding celebrities. Generally though, the difference between a photojournalist and a “paperazzi” photographer is wide. Without photojournalists, events such as Tiananmen square and the moments around the assassination of JFK may never have been recorded, and certainly from the point of investigative journalism it provides a massive public service by uncovering wrong-doing or miscarriages of justice. “Paperazzi” style photography just serves to fuel peoples enthusiam for knowing everything about celebrities every moment of every day, which although to some people may be important, in the grand scheme of things, isn’t.



My reason for this blog today was seeing a clip of the police actively stopping a journalist from recording a protest outside the Greek Embassy in London. The clip below clear shows a member of the Metropolitian Police physically preventing a photographer from working and in the process, shows that an understanding of the law is still alien to some members of the constabulary.



This is showing a worrying trend in photography that has appeared other the last 10 years. It seems that now anyone using a camera in public is viewed with suspicion. People who want to take a picture of their children in the park are quizzed by over zealous council officials, schools banning photography of school plays… the list goes on.

Whilst I appreciate that our society faces an increased number of threats such as terrorism and child abuse, the vast majority of photographers are law abiding citizens.

The laws in the UK are clear that in public it is legal to take photographs of people and places without the need for special permission from the people contained within those photographs. The only restriction on this is taking photographs at places such as railway stations, areas near military installations and certain government buildings is banned.

The questions that we should be asking ourselves is whether we are letting ourselves be led into an Orwellian 1984 society where the state is allowed to photograph us (Britain has the highest number of CCTV cameras in the world per head of population) or whether we act sensibly and calmly without being led by hype?

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 13th, 2008 at 4:47 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.