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New Lows in Attacks on Photography

Recently, Australia has witnessed new lows in paranoia driven over-reactive behaviour. Local Governments, sporting clubs, a school headmaster, commercial organisations and even police officers have taken the view that photographers are today’s great threat to our safety!

The preventive measure to counter society's greatest evils – paedophilia and terrorism - is to ban photography in public places! Those who enjoy recording life's day-to-day events and the environment in which they live are now labelled as potential evil doers.

Recently in Queensland a school headmaster announced his initiative for 2006 is to ban all photography of children playing sports – to prevent paedophile activities. It seems that there is a view that those attending that school’s sporting events cannot be trusted with a camera.

What is the correlation between camera use and the propensity for paedophilia? Has this headmaster discovered research showing that the vast majority of camera owners have paedophilia tendencies? It is hardly as if official investigations into child abuse show that the evil deeds perpetrated within schools began with photography at sporting events. He draws a ridiculously long bow that should offend camera owners and photographers everywhere. He is also insulting the school’s parents by imposing a ban that has the effect of saying some of them are paedophiles.

Regardless of how noble this headmaster may feel his actions are in the pursuit of a safer environment for his charges; his “initiative” is at best illogical – alarmist, offensive and entirely unnecessary.

Surely we have all learned by now that not all followers of Islam are terrorists, despite the fact that some terrorists follow the Islamic faith.

All criminal activities are perpetrated by a small minority. Paedophiles usually perpetrate their evils in secret being renowned for their cowardly ways. More logically, this headmaster might consider banning the possession of mobile phones at school events because these might have a hidden camera function.



No photo of a child, even nude, is per se, evil. It's the intent and use of images that becomes evil. The great English photographer of the Victorian era, Frank Sutcliffe is still remembered for his iconic images of young boys who shed their clothes to go swimming while playing truant and avoiding capture by truant officers – a masterful record of the era and life in that city.

Being a priest, an orphanage worker or a de-facto husband does not and should never label a person as having a greater risk of paedophilia tendencies just because in the past priests, teachers, orphanage workers and de factos have been convicted of crimes against children.

This idiotic initiative was matched by security guards’ behaviour in the city of Geelong. The local amateur photography club photographing the Shell refinery’s gas storage facility was challenged by guards who insisted this was not permitted because it may be a terrorist threat. This was made worse by a police visit to a club member, warning him not to photograph the storage site.

Certainly such stupidity was not invented by the guards themselves; indeed it must have been put in their heads by the most senior managers of the company they protect – people who should know better.

But, of greater concern is that the police have no business “enforcing” non-existent laws. God knows it was once hard enough to get police to intervene in violent family disputes.
Now it seems persons “armed” with a camera, exercising their creative spirit in a public place are seen as a potential terrorist threat - simply because they were facing their lenses in the “wrong: direction. Surely if the threat of terrorism is so great, Shell should build a massive shed over the entire site just like the CIA and Secret Service might do to protect their high risk sites.



Where will such ignorance take us? What can we expect next - the banning of binoculars and telescopes because their owners may be spies and peeping Toms? The serious worry for us all is that such misguided people will continue to concoct imbecilic ideas about how best to protect the world from every type of wrong-doer.

Fear is a contagious condition and can quickly rise into hysterical behaviour, but just when Australians were becoming critical of America’s recently often hysterical behaviour, we seem to have invented our own, which seems to be compounded by people in senior positions we trust to have greater sense.

We owe it to ourselves to stand up and revolt; challenge those who, through such illogical thinking, would effectively accuse us of evil because we use a camera. We must prevent such over reactive behaviour from securing a never-to-be undone foothold.

We must fight back and not be intimidated by them and, as has occurred in the UK, even take civil action against those who will so label us and restrict our creative pursuits.

If we do not act, we risk a less rich era where so much of our life events and day-to-day social history will never be visually recorded for future generations. We should ensure that the gifts of great "street" photographers like Henri Cartier-Bresson, Frank Sutcliffe, and social essayists like Bill Brandt and so many others can live on. If we do not act now, not only will one of the great art forms of the modern era may be lost forever; but, the widening disease of “guilt by association” will harm us all.


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