Photographers, know your rights: attorney and photographer advocate Bert P. Krages II has created The Photographer’s Right, a PDF file meant to be printed, stowed in your camera bag and distributed in the event of a confrontation. …
3 thoughts on “Photographers’ rights”
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Did someone try to harass you for taking pictures somewhere Thom?
There was a traffic accident in my neighborhood a last spring, and I happened on it with one of my cameras so I started taking pictures. A Baltimore City policeman came up to me and asked me to stop “for him”, with an implied undertone to his voice that suggested if I wouldn’t do him the favor, he’d have to make it an order. I stood my ground but it was a scary moment. It was the first time something like that had ever happened to me, and I wondered later that day if we’d come to the point where simply using a camera in public constituted “suspicious activity” You know…what they keep telling us to report on those highway alert signs.
A few months later I took a road trip vacation, driving all over the southwest, photographing barns and grain elevators and old industrial sites, wondering if I was going to be arrested by a local cop for suspicious activity.
No, so far I haven’t been harrassed personally, fortunately, but I’ve seen more and more accounts of folks here in DC and in New York who have. So I want to be prepared, especially now that I have my much more professional-looking Nikon D70, as opposed to my old point-and-click, and since I’m taking many more pictures, especially from unusual angles or of unusual subjects.
This is one of those links that makes me wonder what people did before the internet… being only 22 I never really had to experience that but really information is so accessible these days it is hard to imagine life without it.