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Cheers - AE

Sunday 24 January 2010

Everybody say cheese.

Looks like the mass photo gathering in Trafalgar Square organised by photographernotaterrorist.org, and I'm sure attended by at least one, if not more, of the regular reads on my blogroll*, has been fairly successful in that the tanks didn't roll in Tianamen style and everyone ended up being dragged away to waiting hosepipes. More importantly that they seem to have got a decent turnout.

Listen!

A couple of interesting points though: around 0:32 there's mention of some booing because a uniformed goon tried to stop people taking photos of the National Gallery, and roughly 0:50 it's said that there were a few plastic plods about but they left everyone alone. This suggests that the way to go about taking photos in the UK these days is to have 3,000 friends with you (or if you're a pro an unfeasibly large number of photographic assistants), and that's not really much to shout about. The media coverage is also a bit disappointing. Naturally there'd be stuff in the professional and hobbyist photo publications but the mainstream media have let the side down a bit, with only the Grauniad and the Beeb devoting much space to it in the UK. The Telegraph cover it well (that's their author in the audio clip) but it was only in their blog section, which presumably means it's not in the print version at all. The Fail gave it a couple of paragraphs but online at least it looks like column filler stuff. Other than that right now (Sunday lunchtime for me) it seems to be non-UK news sources, and that is odd. Surely the MSM must be at least as big a target for S44 abuse as all the amateur photographers, terrorists tourists and freelance pros who've been getting hassled. Why the fuck aren't they banging the drum about this?

I have a feeling that more protests might be necessary for this to get the coverage it really deserves.

UPDATE: Rather more at G.O.T.

* For very obvious reasons it was never on the cards that I was going to go, which is a bit of a shame as I used to live only an hour or so by train from London. But needless to say if the same thing happened here I'd be on the way to Canberra - I've been tempted to buy a new camera for a while now.

2 comments:

JuliaM said...

"This suggests that the way to go about taking photos in the UK these days is to have 3,000 friends with you (or if you're a pro an unfeasibly large number of photographic assistants), and that's not really much to shout about."

No, but baby steps, baby steps...

If more protests are indeed needed, let's hope they will be larger.

Angry Exile said...

I was only kidding about that being not much to shout about. My point is the apparent apathy of the MSM and how bizarre given how many photographers they employ. Sixteen hours after I wrote that blog post and if Google News is anything to go by there's still more coverage outside the UK than inside it. WTF?

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