Particularly in the wake of 9/11 questions about public photography continue to arise. On the one hand we live in more of a surveillance society than ever with pervasive closed circuit cameras all over the place and now even the so-called see through cameras at airports. On the other hand individual photography is more restricted than ever, even as cheap digital cameras and cameras in cell phones and the rise of sites like Flickr and Photobucket, not to mention YouTube for videos, makes it the norm for people to walk around everywhere casually snapping shots as they go.

Either way both are symptoms of the ubiquitous loss of privacy that is a very real issue but they also raise the question of who is empowered to violate that privacy, only the authorities over a given area or everyone. It’s a troubling issue that goes right back to the universal glass bowl envisioned by Isaac Asimov’s The Dead Past, one of the earliest and clearest SF visions of a Surveilance society.

I’m not much for photography myself but I understand the documentary impulse and I can see both sides to the Thomas Hawk MOMA story that’s all over Boing Boing and everywhere else, but it’s also a collection of multiple narratives. Was Hawk kicked out for simply photographing in the atrium or was he kicked out on suspicion of shooting down a young girl’s blouse, as some supposed eyewitnesses have alleged. Was he kicked out because Blint lacked the grounding in photography to distinguish one kind of camera from another, and then there’s the McDonalds theory.

I’m all for civil liberties myself, but I have to ask whether photographers should have an unlimited right to shoot anywhere. The photos Hawk showed don’t violate anyone’s privacy, but at the same time taking photos of crowds from above is rife with potential for such violations. Is there a difference between photographing objects and turning people into subjects? I think that there is.