Standing up for photographers’ rights

A piece of legislation responsible for many of the recent confrontations between police and photographers in the UK has just been declared unlawful by the Court of Human Rights. But it is unlikely to be amended any time soon.

And as photographers’ rights in the UK and the USA are eroded by heavy-handed police responses driven in the main by fear of terrorism, some photographers are taking a stronger stand.

In Britain, the notorious Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 was the subject of a case brought by campaign group Liberty.

The Court ruled that:

“…the powers of authorisation and confirmation as well as those of stop and search… are neither sufficiently circumscribed nor subject to adequate legal safeguards against abuse … They are not therefore ‘in accordance with the law’.”

Basic UK law, like its American constitutional counterpart, says that it’s legal to take photos of anything in sight from a public place.

But Section 44, which became law in the UK in 2000, gave police officers the right to stop and search anyone, for any reason, inside a designated but undefined “area”.

Whole counties and entire cities were promptly named as designated areas. For months on end. The process of area designation was entirely private and left in the hands of senior police officers.

Although the Court of Human Rights has just declared Section 44 unlawful, there’s little hope of the law itself changing any time soon. British politics is caught up in the frenzied manoeuvrings of an unofficial election campaign, and a General Election could be called at any time in the next few weeks. No-one at Westminster is going to be paying any attention to what the Court in Strausbourg thinks.

Nor will many politicians be paying much attention to the ongoing I’m a Photographer, Not a Terrorist campaign and forthcoming rally to be held in London’s Trafalgar Square later this month.

The campaign has been a huge success on Facebook, attracting over 10,000 fans in a matter of weeks.

Campaign co-founder and professional press photographer Jeff Moore has had 20 years experience in the business, and admits that even he was shocked at the level of support.

“I was completely gobsmacked,” he says when asked about the campaign’s success. “And delighted. This campaign is about ensuring freedom for ordinary people to take photographs.”

The idea for “I’m a Photographer, Not a Terrorist” came from discussions Jeff had with fellow photographer Jess Hurd last year. The pair realised that while professional press photographers like themselves had a good understanding of how to deal with over-enthusiastic police officers and security guards, many others did not.

Jeff says: “We realised there were a lot of people, like architects and students and ordinary folk just taking photos for fun, who might find themselves stopped under terrorist legislation. That can be a very daunting, intimidating experience.

“This campaign is not about big name professionals. It’s about people. It’s about Mrs Smith who wants to take photos of her kids in the street, or of buildings she thinks are interesting.”

The Trafalgar Square rally will not be a big political event, he insists.

“There won’t be any speakers or politicians. It’ll just be lots of people coming together to celebrate their right to take photos in a public place. We need to say to the people in charge: ‘This is wrong.’ Because it is wrong.”

The Metropolitan Police, the force responsible for central London, has this clear advice on its own web site:

“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.”

But that doesn’t stop incidents like the one, last December, in which architecture photographer Grant Smith was stopped by security guards at London’s Bank of America building while he took photos of the church next door.

Incidents like this one often occur when Section 44 is mis-used, or when it is used correctly but its clauses misunderstood. Section 44 allows police to stop you and conduct a low-level physical search of your person by removing outer clothing and patting down your body. But it does not require the photographer to give a name, address, date of birth, reason for being in that location, or explanation of his or her actions.

It’s these last two points that often cause difficulties. As part of a casual conversation between photographer and police officer, the questions “What are you up to?” or “What are you taking photos of?” are very likely to crop up. The photographer is under no obligation to answer either; but refusal is often seen as making trouble, which in turns leads to a small confrontation blowing up into a larger one.

American photographers have a constitutional right to take pictures in public places. But as Photocine News co-founder Lou Lesko pointed out on his blog a couple months ago, a photographer in pursuit of a shot often looks like someone behaving very oddly indeed. We all know what he means: the crouch, the hunch, the lying-flat-out-on-the-ground that sometimes has to be done to get the right lens pointing at the right thing at the right angle. It looks weird. And that freaks non-photographers (and sometimes police officers) out.

The I’m a Photographer Bust Card spells out what rights a person does and doesn’t have when stopped by British police. But in the UK or the US, the general consensus is that staying calm and polite is always the best policy, no matter how strongly you feel about your rights being infringed. Make your point, of course: tell those who are questioning you that the law says you have a right to stand where you’re standing, taking the photos you’re taking. But if they continue to insist that you leave, it might be better to co-operate; in the short term at least.

Ultimately, according to Jeff Moore, there’s something more important than individual rights that’s at stake here.

“Our visual history is not being recorded,” he says.

“Think of all those amazing photos of society in the past – those Victorian street scenes, those shots of ordinary life as it used to be.

“That sort of image isn’t being taken anymore, because people are too scared to shoot photos like that in public places. And they shouldn’t be.

“No-one wants the visual history of today to end up as a handful of grainy CCTV images, probably taken by government-owned cameras. That would be terrible for everyone.”

The Trafalgar Square rally starts at 12 noon on Saturday, January 23. Cameras are welcome.