People have always been known to get a little grumpy around photographers, but since 9-11, something akin to a New Cold War on civility and civil rights has erupted in our society.
Just ask Thomas Hawk, a shutterbug living in the Bay Area. Hawk is an active blogger and posts his pictures and words on different sites such as blogspot and flickrnation. The other day while Hawk was making pictures of a building in San Francisco, a security guard came rushing out waving his middle finger at him.
Hawk writes:
So today there I was minding my own business shooting 45 Fremont in downtown San Francisco when all of a sudden a Shorenstein Company employee security guard decides to give me the finger in my photographs of the building. Next thing you know I get the typical hassle. Except normally when the guards come out all polite like and all this guy instead comes out middle finger a blazing and telling me that I'm not allowed to photograph the building from the public space.
Marshall McLuhan’s saying that “the medium is the message” pretty much sums up this encounter. In this case, the guard is the medium and message.
No needs for words any more. If you don’t like someone taking a picture, even when they have every right to do so, just ward them off with a one-finger salute.
Jack Anderson spoke about our constitutionally guaranteed rights to freedom of expression and freedom of the press. Anderson contends:
" Our Founding Fathers understood that government by its nature tends to oppress those it has power over. Our Founding Fathers decided that there must be, there had to be, there should be and there is, an institution that keeps an eye on government. That is what we do. There is nothing in the Constitution about the freedom to practice law.
There is nothing in the Constitution about the freedom to practice medicine.
There is nothing in the Constitution about the freedom to engage in commerce.
There is nothing in the Constitution about teaching or learning. But there is something in the Constitution about the freedom of the press.
Our Founding Fathers understood that it would be necessary to have a watchdog on government, and that is our role: to keep a watch out."
--Jack Anderson, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, in 1999 speech at Utah State University.
Thanks to Ted Pease for the Anderson Quote!
In response to this situation I sent an email to the public relations office of the Shorenstein Company who manages the property and hires the building's security services. I wanted to share my letter on my blog because I think it raises some interesting questions about human visual behavior and the blogosphere.
Dear Press Relations:
I am a journalism professor investigating human visual behavior, especially in photography and society.
I found this blog post on April 17, showing a Shorenstein employee intimidating a photographer with what is considered in our culture a rude gesture. I am absolutely confident that you train your security people to act professionally and I find this behavior not only offensive personally but also indicative of the times in which we live.
The blog is called Thomas Hawk's Digital Connection and has generated interesting feedback from the photojournalism community about the issues raised by the guard's perception of the photographer's activity as criminal. As an instructor who teaches public journalism, blogging and visual culture, I find this case to be very interesting. Do you think the guard would have acted this way if he had known that his picture would been broadcast over the Internet within hours? There are several things that we can learn from this incident:
1) Technology democratizes communication to a global audience in an instant.
2) Since 9-11 we have entered a sort of New Cold War on civil rights and civility in this country.
3) We are all stakeholders in a representative democracy, which becomes ever more significant during a time when the lines between private and public are seemingly being redrawn for us in a digital age.
My final suggestion here:
Your employees should know the laws of this land, because if they don't they may make your company look silly on someone's blog.
Sincerely,
Dennis Dunleavy, Ph.D.