Secret buildings you can’t photograph
Faith Ringgold’s The Flag is Bleeding deals more with race and Vietnam but, you know. Whatever.
Joerg has linked to an article from my hometown paper, The Washington Post, discussing what happens to photographers who happen to snap a picture of a building they’re not supposed to. The Washington area is littered with these types of locations as the headline of the article, “Secret Buildings You May Not Photograph, Part 643,” would suggest. This has happened to me, but in not such a secret location. I was in the parking lot of the Pentagon in August of 2004 and had make a trip out there with the express purpose of provoking this kind of confrontation just to see what would happen.
What happened, of course, was my film was confiscated after I even go to the middle of the parking lot, in fact, before and I had even taken a photograph and I was asked told to provide identification. I asked the officer what would happen to me if I refused to provide my ID to the officer — he told me I would be detained. I showed him my ID and he copied the information from it into his notebook. He told me to leave the same way I came with haste. I did.
I went looking for this experience because I have a problem authority. And it’s not exactly as if photographs of the outside of the Pentagon would yield anything surprising. But there are plenty of law-abiding individuals, often tourists, who unwittingly bring about encounters with the secret service similar to those of people who get pushed around by the mobsters on The Sopranos. It’s not fun, and even if the person does not undergo an ordeal like that described in the Post piece, they will always walk away shaken.
It would seem to that a tourist or photographer unknowingly photographing a secret building that is effectively kept a secret is no kind of threat. Further, even someone with more violent intentions knowingly photographing something secret is not much of a threat if our government were taking the threat of violence due to terror seriously. Instead, it seems to me that the executive branch in particular has used this opportunity handed to it by terrorists to expand its authority to bully and intimidate its own population.
I try to keep politics out of the discussions on this blog, but in a case like this it’s simply not possible to separate the political from the day-to-day of being a photographer. Don’t take me for a conspiracy theorist or some kind of lefty wingnut, but I think the deterioration of civil liberties seen in this decade is unprecedented in American history. Perhaps the ability to take a photograph isn’t the most important of these liberties to be effected, but I certainly think situations like the one written about in the post are symptoms of a very grave problem.