On a more serious (quiet at the back there!) note…
Illegal harrassment of photographers makes me mad. OK, so I get various levels of mad at everything this stupid, stupid, destructive, regressive, stupid and misanthropic government does, but this abley demonstrates the State paranoia, and the paranoia they engender in everyone.
What we need, as one wag who lives in the real Free World said, is a National Photograph The Police Day. Damn straight. I shall, every day next week, at the same time, wander around the Met’s head office and take pictures from every angle. I am sure if lots of people take pictures of the strong arm of The State, at least some of them will look odd.
I have been thinking for a while of how much the Great Unwashed will take before they take back their liberty. This, however small a deal, should help. More and more people are buying digital cameras, given they have come way down in price. Of course, any TERRIST worth his salt with have a digital SLR, probably with a decent 70 - 300m lense, and maybe a nifty fifty in his backpack as well. And probably a tripod as well, for those all important casing-the-joint HDR shots. Maybe a few filters, not cooling ones, probably warming variants, to see what the buildings would look like when basking in the cleansing fire of God. No self-respecting TERRIST would leave home with anything as downmarket as a point-and-click, and, Heaven forfend, a CMOS mobile phone camera.
Perhaps I should dig out the dictaphone attachment for my iPod as well, and when I get questioned again, I shall record everything said. All the lies, threats, intimidation and cajoling they no doubt will come out with. But I am, while not totally conversant with the ins-and-outs of the legalities, know at least enough to tell when the police are lying, distorting or simply trying to scare me into complying with them.
I mean, I have photographed police before, and even armed ones. Seems, though, I need a permit to take pics on the Underground. Harder to get the Transport Peelers, then. (As I don’t go into a mainline London station in my route optimisations to LondonWorkTakeTwo.) Regardless, I resolve to get pictures of them.
Having read a few good books on the clash of agrarian (religious) societies and (post-Enlightenment) modernity recently, the retreat to first principles (and symbiotic fostering of fundamentalism, for reasons too long to go into now) I can see happening in the paranoid control freak death wish adminsitration we are under is the same paranoid control freak death with that infected Western Europe on the run up to the First World War. The parallels are all there. But hey, if history can’t repeat itself, we can always look to the revisionists. Not that I wish to fall into the trap of drawing similarities, but we should at least learn something from the short history we have, dontchathink?
Once people are willing to listen, we can see how we are being lied to by politicians on that whole science is settled business…
Sheesh, I never go out without at least my small digicam, never know when I will want ot snap somthing.
1
Adele
Sat 23 Aug, 3:23PM