Photography,Privacy and the Public

I. Introduction

In February 2002, a media frenzy erupted in Australia when it was reported that photographs of teenage male rowers from a Melbourne private school, taken without their consent, were published on the internet. The website featured other photographs of male high school students participating in sports including rowing and football, and the football jumpers worn by some of the boys identified the school they attended. All of the boys were photographed in public spaces where their activities could be witnessed by anyone in the area. The adolescent rowers were photographed on the riverbank as they changed out of their rowing gear, and were apparently prepared to be seen by passersby at the time. However, they did not consent to being photographed or to the circulation of the photograph online where it could be viewed by a potentially enormous audience and in many different contexts.

Central to the anxiety about this case was the website in which the photographs were posted, which was described repeatedly in the media as a “gay website.” ¹ This label positioned the teenagers as objects of an anonymous adult homoerotic gaze. Despite the claims about the website made in the press, the webmaster of the site in question asserted that the site was never a “gay website” and that adult links had been placed on the site by hackers. Shortly after the media coverage, the website was shut down and the site and pictures were prohibited from being relocated. Nonetheless, a similar site featuring young sportsmen appeared soon after, where a fee was required to access the photographs. ²

The teenagers themselves reported various reactions to the publication of their image on the website including feelings of anger, a sense of violation, concern that older men would view them as sexual objects, anxiety about being in public places, feeling exploited and an invasion of privacy. ³ Before long the boys’ story was to become a feature of wider Australian privacy debates where it illustrated the potential threat to privacy that may occur in public, particularly towards children and young people. ⁴ Pervading the media coverage of these debates was a series of imbricated assumptions that the publication of the photographs on a gay website is inherently harmful, that the boys must be protected from that harm by the state, and that the protection should take the form of amendments to privacy legislation. ⁵

The view that privacy is increasingly under threat informs much of the demand for law reform in relation to photography in public space. In a 2005 report into “Unauthorised Photographs on the Internet and Ancillary Privacy Issues” the Australian Standing Committee of Attorneys General asks whether photography restrictions should be increased in order to protect our privacy, even when we are in public. ⁶ Existing laws prohibit the production of particular types of offensive photographs in Australia in the name of privacy. In the state of Victoria, it is an offence to take photographs of a “private activity” without the consent of the subjects. ⁷ New South Wales has introduced laws against “filming for indecent purposes,” which make it an offence to photograph someone “in a state of undress, engaged in a ‘private act’ or in circumstances where a reasonable person would expect privacy.” ⁸ South Australian child pornography legislation stipulates that “a person who acting for a prurient purpose makes a photographic, electronic or other record from which the image, or images, of a child engaged in a private act may be reproduced, is guilty of an offence.” ⁹ In contrast to these existing laws, the focus of Attorneys’ General Discussion Paper is whether or not we should move towards legislating the context in which photographs circulate as a means of protecting privacy, even when their content is inoffensive.

Concerns for privacy dominate other contemporary Australian photography controversies, which in turn are used to stimulate calls for changes to privacy laws and greater restrictions on the practise of photography in public. Bans on “spy phones” in public swimming pool changing rooms at 110 YMCA sports and aquatic centers across Victoria in 2003 were made in response to the perception of a potential invasion of privacy. ¹⁰ This rising fear that mobile phone cameras may be used in changing rooms also led to demands for a more widespread review of Australian privacy laws in 2003. ¹¹ Similarly, when Surf Life Saving Australia proposed the prohibition of photography of its nippers on beaches without written parental permission, the restriction was couched in terms of a protection of privacy. Sean O’Connell, spokesperson for Surf Life Saving Australia, noted that “parents entrust their kids to us expecting that they will be looked after. One of the things we have to think about is their privacy.” ¹² As in the case of the schoolboy rowers, in this instance a slippage occurred between child protection, privacy and the banning of photography in public space.

This article will analyze the increasingly complex links between photography, privacy and the public in order to assess the impact of such photography restrictions in contemporary Australia. There is urgency in such an analysis. Already these anxieties have created a climate of uncertainty and suspicion in which photographers are frequently questioned, threatened and physically assaulted simply for using their cameras in public. ¹³ However, the long term affects of this atmosphere on our future recorded histories and experience of the public must also be considered. In the words of the Communications and Journalism lecturer, Paul Frosh, photography can be understood usefully as “both the index and agent of publicness itself.” ¹⁴ Photography has become fundamental to the social and to public life. Its power to make visible is central to the ways we structure, negotiate and experience the public and the private in a society “where publicness and visibility are closely interwoven.” ¹⁵ Seen from such a perspective, restrictions on photography in public space seem to signal larger shifts in our sense of shared public life in an era of privatization.

In order to fully comprehend what is at stake in calls for greater photography restrictions, this article will critique simplistic notions of privacy as a basic human right and develop a more rigorous understanding of the culturally and historically specific character of privacy. After examining the various ways that privacy has been defined and their close ties to both the historical rise of individualism and the development of new photographic technologies, it will determine whether the benefits of restrictions on photography in public space outweigh their costs. The implications of these restrictions will be measured with reference to original survey data and interviews with contemporary Australian photographers, as well as their broader impact on public life.

II. The “Right” to Privacy and Photography

Contemporary Australian debates about photography and privacy must be understood in relation to a much larger context in which the “end of privacy” is being declared with increasing frequency and vehemence. In Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom, writers and social commentators declare that our privacy is being eroded to such an extent that it will be lost completely. Time magazine’s cover from August 25, 1997, which proclaimed the “death of privacy,” ¹⁶ is one striking example. The American writer, Richard Spinello, takes a similar mournful tone in his article “The End of Privacy” when he writes: “The title of this article may sound ominous, but it is intended to convey the stark reality that our personal privacy may gradually be coming to an end.” ¹⁷ David Brin is more dramatic, drawing on metaphors of warfare to argue that our “privacy is under siege.” ¹⁸ In recent years, everything from the electronic distribution of personal information to receiving unwanted telephone calls from telemarketers has been cast as a threat to our supposedly rapidly diminishing privacy. ¹⁹

Although there is currently no statutory right to privacy in Australia, the perception that privacy is increasingly under threat has pushed this issue onto the agenda. In July 2011, the Australian federal Parliament invited responses from the public on the possible introduction of a statutory right to privacy. ²⁰ The Minister for Privacy, Brendan O’Connor, describes the changing climate that led to this initiative:

We know that privacy is a growing concern for everyday Australians – whether it is in our dealings with individuals, businesses, government agencies or the media … Privacy is emerging as a defining issue of the modern era, especially as new technology provides more opportunities for communication, but also new challenges to privacy. ²¹

A public issues paper was subsequently introduced in September 2011 to canvas the prospect of introducing a statutory cause of action for serious invasions of privacy. ²² These proposed changes respond to a shift in public opinion, which has for a number of years had a troubling impact upon the practise and perception of public photography in Australia.

As the professional Australian photographer, Ken Duncan, discovered in 2009 when he was working at the Cairns Esplanade Lagoon, existing fears about the loss of privacy are easily co-opted to empower those seeking to inhibit certain actions to impose restrictions without reasonable or rational justification. After being accused by security guards of being a potential pedophile, despite the absence of children in the area in which he was working, Duncan was forced to stop work at the Lagoon and pay a $665 fee for a one-week permit before being allowed to resume photographing. “I was told the main reason they’re doing it is to protect people’s privacy,” recalls Duncan. ²³ An awkward slippage between privacy and the protection of children against sexual predators is evident in official justifications of these restrictions. The then Cairns Regional Council Chief Executive Officer, Noel Briggs, noted that rules regarding permits at the Lagoon were established in 2003 to “protect the recreational users of the facilities from predatory photographic practices.” Briggs explained further: “I could get dressed up as a professional photographer and take a photo and I could be the biggest pedophile on earth – we are preventing that because we have a permit and we’re protecting the public’s interest.” ²⁴ According to Briggs’ curious logic, payment of the permit fee had the dual purpose of ensuring that the photographer is not a pedophile and that the privacy of other users of the pool is protected. Forming a particularly potent brew, existing anxieties about the loss of privacy are here mixed with other public fears about crimes against children in order to stifle debate about the limitations that the Lagoon’s management wish to place on photography.

This example highlights how the perception of photographers as a threat to privacy, public security and child safety is indicative of a larger process of “othering” that pervades some aspects of privacy debates. As we aspire to protect our own privacy, we tend to deny the same respect to others because “we” are innocent and “they” are suspect. Various suspect “others” have appeared in the debates about photography restrictions, including male photographers deemed potential pedophiles, people of foreign appearance who are labeled potential terrorists and anonymous viewers of websites featuring photographs of children and young people, like the one on which the photograph of the schoolboy rowers was posted. In a climate in which carrying a camera is enough to place a person under suspicion, the conflation of other public fears with anxieties about privacy to legitimize photography restrictions will inevitably lead to further unfounded accusations against photographers working in public.

Rather than questioning these claims to a right to privacy, Australian photographers seeking to contest restrictions on their practice are countering them with assertions of other liberal rights. Such claims for photographers’ rights deeply inform the discourse of the lobby group, Arts Freedom Australia (AFA), which formed in 2004. Amongst the group’s high profile activities was its organization of a rally in August 2010, in which approximately 700 photographers gathered at the Rocks in Sydney to protest against restrictions on photography in public space. Wearing t-shirts emblazoned with “I’m a Photographer not a Criminal,” the protesting photographers demanded more respect for their rights to freedom of movement and expression. Similar claims for rights appear in the group’s blog. A founding member of AFA, Ken Duncan, declares:

Australia has been a signatory to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights since 1980 and one of the articles of the ICCPR states that everyone has the right to freedom of expression and the right to impart information and ideas of all kinds whether it’s in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media. ²⁵

Duncan’s defense of photographers’ rights to free expression fails to acknowledge how this right may conflict with other liberal rights, such as the right to privacy, which is also protected under the same covenant under Article 17. Responses from various readers of the AFA blog nonetheless reveal how deeply this demand for photographers’ rights to free expression is felt by members.

Although this absolutist discourse of rights is seductive and a powerful means of gaining support for a cause, it ultimately risks failing to work in the interest of either photographers or defenders of privacy because it delimits the debate that is required to achieve a workable resolution. There is some cynicism around this discourse of rights. Sophie Howarth and Stephen McLaren argue in their book, Street Photography Now, “photographers do not exist in a moral bubble and those who behave as if an unfettered right to point a camera is enshrined in the Magna Carta or the Bill of Rights do not help the delicate contemporary situation.” ²⁶ Instead of simply proclaiming a right to privacy and another right to freedom of photographic expression, it is important to understand the historical, cultural and political connections that bind photography, privacy and the public sphere, and carefully consider the consequences of restrictions of photography for us all. However, before this analysis can take place, careful consideration must be given to exactly what we mean by the concept of privacy as it relates to photography in public.

III. The Blurry Boundaries of Privacy

Privacy is a concept that has long proven difficult to define. The Standing Committee of Attorneys General report into “Unauthorised Photographs on the Internet and Ancillary Privacy Issues” acknowledges this difficulty and draws on two famous American definitions of privacy to frame the Australian debate: Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis’s notion of privacy as “the right to be let alone,” and Alan Westin’s definition of privacy as “the claim of individuals, groups or institutions to determine for themselves when, how and to what extent information about them is communicated to others.” ²⁷ Originally coined by Judge Thomas Cooley in 1888, the notion of privacy as the “right to be let alone” was popularized by Warren and Brandeis’s article, published two years later in Harvard Law Review, which called upon the courts to recognize a remedy in tort for invasions to privacy. ²⁸ Warren and Brandeis’s concept of privacy continues to be one of the most highly cited definitions. Westin’s analysis of privacy, published in his book Privacy and Freedom in 1967, is also commonly cited by privacy commentators. ²⁹ Westin seeks to defend privacy as a concept that promotes democracy, free society, enhances personal autonomy, and creates the possibility of limited and protected communication. ³⁰

Related to Warren and Brandeis’s notion of the right to be let alone is the concept of privacy as “a condition of limited accessibility.” ³¹ A significant contributor to this aspect of privacy discourse, Ruth Gavison, argues that privacy plays a vital role in protecting and promoting the liberty of action, mental health, autonomy, creativity and the capacity to make and foster human relations. To Gavison, anonymity is an essential component of privacy. ³² Jeffrey Reiman similarly defines privacy in terms of access as “the condition in which other people are deprived of access to either some information about you or some experience of you.” ³³ Reiman disagrees with definitions of privacy that are based on control, arguing that they lead to anomalies in our understanding of privacy and its protection in law. Although control is important in some aspects of privacy, Reiman suggests that privacy should not be restricted to these issues: “The right to privacy is not my right to control access to me – it is my right that others be deprived of that access.” ³⁴

Drawing on the Greek etymology of the term, Hannah Arendt frames privacy as a deprivation from participation in the polis. In this sense, argues Arendt, to live an entirely private life is

to be deprived of the reality that comes from being seen and heard by others, to be deprived of an “objective” relationship with them that comes from being related to and separated from them through the intermediary of a common world of things, to be deprived of the possibility of achieving something more permanent than life itself. ³⁵

The public/private dichotomy implicit in Arendt’s account of privacy is problematic as it obscures the longstanding interrelationships that bind the public and private. Writing in criticism of Arendt, Larry Peterman notes that at the end of the first book of the Politics, Aristotle comments that we

cannot consider the primary relationship of the family – in particular husband-wife and parent-child – without first looking from the polis, the home of the family, to the politeia, the regime that gives form to the polis and thereby to some extent the family. ³⁶

Establishing binary oppositions between the public and the private, either historically or in relation to the present, risk obscuring these and other social and political complexities.

This diversity of approaches to privacy and the public lead to the larger conclusion that “there is no essential ‘private’ and no intrinsic ‘public,’ no obvious psychological or anthropological constant underlying these concepts.” ³⁷ Rather than claiming an essential right or definition of privacy, it is therefore vital to understand the ways in which concepts of privacy change continually in relation to different social and historical circumstances. As the term privacy plays a variety of roles in contemporary neoliberal discourse about rights and freedoms, for clarity’s sake it is important to focus specifically on the meanings of privacy that have historically informed the use and meanings of photography and continue to circulate in debates about photography restrictions in Australia today.

IV. The Recent History of Privacy

Modern definitions of privacy and efforts to enshrine it in law, such as Warren and Brandeis’s argument for “the right to be let alone,” cannot be divorced from the modern rise of individualism and capitalism. The fetishization of the right to privacy is a relatively recent development that coincided with other social and political changes including globalization, modernization and de-traditionalization. This connection pervades the literature on privacy, in which the defense of privacy is grounded explicitly in the protection of individuality and personhood, and is bound to the defense of capitalism in liberalism. ³⁸ The concept of privacy helps liberalism shape the defense of the individual and in doing so privacy also ideologically supports the consolidation of the power of capital. ³⁹

Warren and Brandeis’s definition of privacy may be appealing to contemporary Australian privacy advocates, but it must be understood in this historical and social context. At a personal or biographical level, Warren and Brandeis were intimately connected to a culture of capital and individualism in modern America. Warren was a member of a socially prominent Boston family and the son-in-law of a secretary of state, while Brandeis was his law partner and a future Supreme Court justice. Their paper on privacy grew out of the concern that the “sacred precincts of private and domestic life” had to be defended against the threat of invasion from the mass media. Privacy was accordingly defined in their paper as “a distinctive property right and cultural privilege.” ⁴⁰ The tone of Warren and Brandeis’s article has been criticized for giving “the strong impression of wounded gentility and an alarmist defense of traditional values.” ⁴¹ Eden Osucha refers to their clichéd description of “man’s house as his castle,” amongst other things. ⁴²

The introduction of privatization and materialism into modern bourgeois life also led to greater emphasis being placed on personal life, emotions and individual expression. This inward trend, reinforced by the development of psychoanalysis and an interest in the unconscious, deeply informs the growth in demand for privacy in the twentieth century. With the rise of individuality, personal expression, new emphasis upon forms of personal interaction like friendships and intimate relationships, and new forms of commercial and market-based publics, the private domain came to dominate social and cultural relations.

Privacy has now come to play an important role in facilitating self-definition, even when we are in public. It is what enables us to present edited versions of ourselves to different audiences, and only expose those aspects of ourselves that we want others to see. Our colleagues at work may be invited to see one side of us, while our family and friends see another. ⁴³ It is no coincidence that the current obsession with privacy occurs in a culture spellbound with the self-image, where everything from fashion to home improvements are marketed as an expression of our unique subjectivities, and where the proliferation of online social networking has meant that personal relationships expand in ever wider circles. The prevalence of the language of self-reliance, self-realization, self-help, self-determination, self-fulfillment and self-interestedness in contemporary culture is another important marker of this trend. While we relish in entertainments that spectacularize invasions of privacy, such as the reality television program Big Brother, confessional TV talk shows, celebrity gossip magazines and voyeuristic websites, we demand more and more privacy for ourselves. Far from ending privacy, these technologies and entertainments are increasing our expectations for it.

This culture of individualism and privacy is seductive, and underpins defenses of the continuing legitimacy of personal privacy as “central to dignity and individuality.” ⁴⁴ However, its dominance also has important implications for our ability to engage actively and critically in the public sphere. The key ethical position of liberalism is that “the private has a moral and political priority over a public sphere, which itself can only be constructed from individuals in voluntary association.” ⁴⁵ In seeking to defend privacy as a means of protecting individualism, we retreat into individual worlds where our ability to challenge the state as a collective and generate more meaningful political and social change is delimited.

Problematically, defenses of street photography often reinforce this discourse of individualism and self-possessive expression. In texts such as Colin Westerbeck and Joel Meyerowitz’s Bystander: A History of Street Photography, street photography is framed in terms of the individual photographer’s unique vision or signature style – their particular way of seeing that provides insight into “the human condition.” ⁴⁶ In the process, notions of shared public life that the photographs may express are reframed by discourses of individuality and authorship. Comparable defenses of photographers take place in the press. Supporters of the Australian photographer Rex Dupain invoke his famous father, the celebrated modernist photographer Max Dupain, to declare his special authority as a photographer of public life. Rex Dupain is no stranger to photography restrictions. In 2005, he was forced to cancel a shoot at a Sydney eastern suburbs surf club because the club had forgotten to tell parents that he was coming and some parents became extremely aggressive, waving a crucifix and shouting abuse. ⁴⁷ In another instance, Dupain was questioned by police for 25 minutes while taking pictures for his new book The Colour of Bondi at Bondi Beach. At this time the photographer had his camera confiscated even though he was not breaking any laws. ⁴⁸ By defending Dupain’s rights to photograph with claims to his special vision as an artistic photographer, debate remains fixed in the existing paradigm of individuality and self-possession that underpins anxieties about photography, privacy and public space in the first place.

Some privacy critics have sought to delve deeper into these issues by exploring the gendered character of privacy and its impact on women. Feminist law historians and philosophers, including Janice Richardson, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Sally F. Goldfarb, Anita Allen and Erin Mack, point out how binary models that oppose public life and privacy have worked historically to keep the abuse of women and children within the “private” domestic realm. ⁴⁹ When the boundaries of privacy are policed as a family matter, domestic violence and sexual abuse are kept away from the public realms of the law and government. ⁵⁰ Declaring “the personal is political,” feminists of the 1970s celebrated the challenge to this aspect of privacy. In contrast, the anxiety about photographs taken of children in public and fears of pedophilic photographers lurking behind every bush, expressed in calls for photography restrictions around schools and playgrounds, ⁵¹ have the effect of keeping photographs of children locked firmly within the private domain of the family, away from state intervention. The Senior Lecturer in Child Psychology at the University of New South Wales, Mark Dadds, comments that this restriction of photographs of children to the private realm will do nothing to minimize the abuse of children, as most pedophiles prey on members of their own families or are known to their victims. ⁵²

Today, the demand for privacy has escalated to the point where there is an increasing expectation for privacy in public space. This trend is not limited to Australia and has a significant history. In a much-cited text on privacy torts in the United States, published in the California Law Review in 1960, Dean William Prosser famously states that:

On the public street, or in any other public place, the plaintiff has no right to be alone, and it is no invasion of privacy to do no more than follow him about. Neither is it such an invasion to take his photograph in such a place, since this amounts to nothing more than making a record, not differing essentially from a full written description, of a public sight which any one person would be free to see. ⁵³

Prosser’s argument against privacy in public is challenged more recently by law commentators such as Andrew McClurg, Elizabeth Paton-Simpson and N. A. Moreham who maintain that privacy should now be extended to the public domain, to take into account changing expectations of privacy and the impact of new surveillance and communications technologies. ⁵⁴

The proliferation of surveillance technologies and the circulation of personal information have deeply informed two recent reports into privacy law in the Australian states of Victoria and New South Wales: the Victorian Law Reform Commission’s Surveillance in Public Places: Final Report tabled in Parliament on August 12, 2010, and the New South Wales Law Reform Commission’s Invasion of Privacy, Report 127, issued in 2010. ⁵⁵ Chairperson of the Victorian Law Reform Commission, Professor Neil Rees, reported that the proposed reforms aimed to balance the benefits of public place surveillance, such as security and crime detection, with the need to protect people against the risks of abuse. ⁵⁶ The NSW Law Reform Commission’s Invasion of Privacy Report 127 examined the extent to which the current privacy laws in NSW effectively protect individual privacy, with the aim of simplifying the law and addressing inconsistencies to facilitate adequate enforcement of privacy legislation. Unlike the 2005 Attorneys General report into the unauthorized use of photographs online, these reports do not address the issue of the public photography directly, but they do point to recent shifts in expectations for privacy in public that have an important impact on photography in public space.

It is also pertinent to note that this spotlight on privacy in public is occurring at a time when there have been other developments in privacy law in Australia. The High Court’s decision in Victoria Park Racing & Recreation Grounds Co Ltd v. Taylor (1937) ⁵⁷ is commonly cited as an authority for the argument that there is no tort of invasion of privacy in Australia. However, the High Court in Australian Broadcasting Corporation v. Lenah Game Meats Pty Ltd (2001) held that there was no Australian authority that impeded the development of a tort of invasion of privacy. ⁵⁸ More recently, there have been a number of further developments in common law, in which courts in Victoria and Queensland have began to formulate and recognize a tort for invasion of privacy. In Grosse v. Purvis (2003), the Queensland District Court awarded damages to a plaintiff who had been stalked by the defendant, recognizing “a civil action for damages based on the actionable right of an individual person to privacy.” ⁵⁹ In Doe v. ABC & Ors (2007), the County Court of Victoria found Australia’s national broadcaster liable for breach of confidence and in tort for breach of privacy for naming the victim of a sexual assault on radio. ⁶⁰ These cases, along with the more recent federal government call for submissions on the proposed right to privacy, underscore how privacy law is developing in other fields concurrent with debate about photography, privacy and the public sphere.

The argument that we should not have an expectation of privacy in public surfaces in some aspects of the contemporary Australian debates about photography restrictions, particularly in relation to photographs of women bathing on beaches. In commenting on the arrest of Peter McKenzie, a Sydney laborer who used his mobile phone to photograph women topless on Coogee Beach, the conservative newspaper The Australian, warns women that they should not expect privacy in public. Although the author concedes that McKenzie “acted like a complete idiot,” the locus of blame is ultimately shifted to the women bathers: “Those who choose to disrobe in public should remember that not so long ago it was they who faced arrest. They cannot have it both ways and should not be surprised if their nakedness causes others to stare – or even snap a photo.” ⁶¹ Such arguments fail to acknowledge photography’s unique ability to intensify an invasion of privacy. There is a vast difference between being seen on a beach where we assume that we are being observed only casually and for a short time by a limited number of people, and being recorded, photographed or videotaped for the close scrutiny of a potentially vast audience. Being prepared to sunbathe topless on a public beach does not equate with consent to the creation of permanent images that can be circulated and viewed repeatedly outside of their original context.

Demands for privacy in public are made more complex by claims to control over private property and the privatization of public space. As formerly public spaces such as shopping centers and railway stations are privatized, confusion can be created amongst photographers as to which spaces are private and which are public. A high profile case in Australia illustrates this confusion and the ways in which restrictions on photography in these privately owned public spaces are conflated in public discourse with other anxieties. Managers of Melbourne’s Southbank shopping and entertainment complex arranged for signs to be placed around the complex in 2006 prohibiting photography. The day after the signs were erected, amateur photographer and grandmother, Val Moss, was stopped by the center’s security guards and asked to cease taking photographs “because of the terrorism overseas.” ⁶² After extensive media coverage, the Prime Minister John Howard weighed into the debate, complaining on ABC radio that the ban was “over the top” and that the terrorist threat in Australia does not warrant a ban on photography. ⁶³ It is clear that in this case the threat of terrorism was merely a rationalization for the introduction of new regulations in the privately owned space of the shopping center. Not long after the Melbourne Central shopping center placed similar bans on photography on the grounds of safety, security, privacy and copyright issues. ⁶⁴

Traditional topographical and procedural approaches to public space, where the public is defined in terms of specific spaces within the city such as a city square or certain uses of the space as a site for collective action, have become consequently problematic. ⁶⁵ The shopping mall is a privately owned space organized to facilitate shopping, in which the public is invited to participate providing they obey the rules of the owner of that space. Property owners may also work to limit the ways in which people can engage with each other in these spaces. Not only is photography commonly banned in shopping centers, but in 2010 the Barkley Square shopping center in the Melbourne inner city suburb of Brunswick attempted to prohibit political stalls from the center to further limit the possibilities of public action. ⁶⁶ Such restrictions and the manner with which they are enforced have wider implications for our experiences and expectations of privacy in public, as private security guards and private surveillance practices may not be subject to the same limits as public authorities. Increased demands for privacy in public, such as those addressed in the Victorian Law Reform Commission, Surveillance in Public Places: Final Report, can therefore emerge in response to these patterns of privatization of public space.

The complexity of these issues reveals the importance of taking a historically and culturally specific approach to privacy. Modern expectations for privacy not only coincided with the rise of capitalism and globalization, they arose with the development and proliferation of photography, and had a powerful impact on the ways in which we use and comprehend photographs of ourselves. In the next section, I will focus on the ways in which photography informs a particular subset of conceptions of privacy that focus on the individual in order to better understand what is at stake in debates about photography restrictions in public space.

V. Photography, Individuality and Privacy

The centrality of personal autonomy and individualism in privacy discourse is reflected in the growing perception of our self-image as our property. Photography restrictions and debates surrounding controversial events like the photograph of the Melbourne schoolboy rowers respond to a perceived violation of privacy, but they also reinforce the notion that our image is our property, something to be owned and a fragment of our very individuality that must be protected. A problematic slippage therefore may occur in public perceptions of privacy and its cultural links with individualism. This slippage is marked by a conflation of the right to privacy with rights of publicity, or the rights to own and market one’s image as property. The conception of the self-image as personal property is made evident in lawsuits in which the paparazzi are taken to task over the unauthorized use of celebrity images. When consumer culture encourages more and more of us to conceive of our own image as a commodity or brand, even when it is not circulating as one, we may similarly seek to control the terms of its circulation.

Despite the prevalence of concerns over self-image today, such links between the camera, the self and privacy are certainly not recent phenomena. Warren and Brandeis’s calls for greater legal protection of privacy emerged in direct response to fears that “instantaneous photographs and newspaper enterprise” would invade the domestic sphere, and the belief that “the sacred precincts of private and domestic life” had to be defended against this threat. ⁶⁷ The authors argued that legal defense against the media was required “to protect the privacy of the individual from invasion either by the too enterprising press, the photographers, or the possessor of any other modern device for recording or reproducing scenes or sounds.” ⁶⁸ Existing concepts of individual autonomy and personal injury were accordingly extended in Warren and Brandeis’s article, as the proliferation of cameras and the potential use of photographs in the media posed new threats to privacy.

Much of this anxiety about the use of our image is embedded in the specific qualities of photographic portraiture. As an index, or direct trace of its referent, the photograph of the self is more than a likeness – it is part of oneself. It is as though the camera has taken a miniscule layer of our very being and fixed it to the image surface. This direct relationship between the photograph and its subject can leave us vulnerable to the authority of the photographer and possessor of the image. According to Christa Ludlow: “The person who controls the camera controls us. And so we are outraged to think of photographs taken without our knowledge, which may be used in perverted or humiliating ways.” ⁶⁹ Ludlow’s comment encapsulates the camera’s unique power to transform us simultaneously into a subject of the photograph and an object of the gaze. Photography theorists of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s including Roland Barthes, John Tagg and Allan Sekula have explored this duality in photographic portraiture in a number of ways. To Barthes, the duality is embedded in the medium itself, and its effects are experienced all too sharply when he is photographed. Barthes describes this moment as a kind of death in which he is transformed from a subject into a lifeless, frozen object: “that very subtle moment when, to tell the truth, I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object: I then experience a micro-version of death (of parenthesis): I am truly becoming a specter.” ⁷⁰

Whereas Barthes’ analysis is grounded in the ontology of photography, Tagg and Sekula focus their attention on the circulation of photographs and their links to the discursive production of the subject. They argue that photographic portraiture has been tied historically to the production of our ideal selves as self-possessive and individual. By the time that Warren and Brandeis were writing their article on privacy, honorific photographic portraiture had become an enormous industry. According to Tagg, the individual portrait served as “a sign whose purpose is both the description of an individual and the inscription of social identity.” ⁷¹ Markers of social class and social difference were made evident in professional portraits, and helped to forge self-identity through a process of self-elaboration. In this sense, the development of photographic portraiture is intimately linked to the notion of individualism that characterizes modern capitalism and underpins the concept of privacy. As well as producing an image of a particular individual, the portrait dramatizes the larger concept of individualism that is so central to privacy discourse. Values that Warren and Brandeis sought to protect as aspects of privacy, including subjectivity and a sense of “self-possessive interiority,” are performed and reproduced repeatedly through the portrait.

This history of honorific bourgeois individualism also bears the imprint of an alternate form of portraiture that is repressive and objectifying. Sekula writes: “to the extent that the legal basis of the self lies in the model of property rights, in what has been termed ‘possessive individualism,’ every proper portrait has its lurking, objectifying inverse in the files of the police.” ⁷² Sekula and Tagg draw on Michel Foucault’s theories of power and control to analyze the production of objectified “others” in nineteenth century photographic practises and discourses, such as the police mug shot, and anthropometric and physiognomic studies of race, illness, criminality and insanity. Individuality and personhood are repressed in these photographs, so that the subject may come to represent certain social norms or types. Photographic subjects are thereby framed as objects of the gaze as a part of larger discourses of social regulation.

As two sides of the same coin, the honorific and repressive dimensions of photographic portraiture are latent within the medium. The extent to which one of these dimensions surfaces over the other is largely a product of the circulation and consumption of the image. Portraits therefore have unstable meanings, which may shift over time. This instability is evident when old family portraits come to circulate in the public realm as curiosities to be bought and sold at flea markets. The contemporary trade in vernacular photographs is very large, and as the number of collectors of anonymous family portraits grows so do their prices. At the flea market photography stall, images that would have once been considered honorific portraits of specific individuals see their personal meanings eclipsed by other social and commercial values.

When the subject of the photograph is still alive and has borne witness to this shift across realms of consumption, stress and anxiety can result. A sense of self-possession can extend to the possession of a self-image, and when the circulation of that image occurs beyond our control, it can be experienced as a kind of theft or transgression of personal boundaries. This process was made evident in the United States in the much-cited legal case, Roberson v. Rochester Folding Box Company (1902). ⁷³ The case revolved around Abigail Roberson, a pretty young woman whose respectable photographic portrait had been sold by a photographer to a company that used the image to market pre-packaged flour mix, under the motto “Flour of the Family.” Roberson claimed that the commodification and public circulation of her likeness on the flour advertisements amounted to a gross invasion of her privacy. Her lawyers argued that the invasion of Roberson’s privacy went beyond the “theft” of her likeness. The circulation of the image, “conspicuously posted and displayed in stores, warehouses, saloons, and other public places” ⁷⁴ was the key to the privacy invasion. As a young lady, Roberson would never have dreamt of entering such establishments. Female presence in these areas of public life was deemed unseemly at the time, and it was argued that when her image was displayed in such spaces, Roberson was effectively made a prostitute. The conflation of the self with the image of the self was made explicit in this defense. Roberson’s claim was initially successful, but it was overturned by the New York State Court of Appeals which ruled that no relevant precedent could be found in case law or in the relevant rule in statutory law. However, the public outcry over this much-publicized case was central to the state legislature’s decision the following year to recognize the right to privacy under the New York Civil Rights Law. Although the legal ramifications of this case apply specifically to the United States, the case speaks more broadly to the special significance of the photographic portrait as an indexical trace of its subject and the links between indexicality and our anxieties about the photograph’s circulation.

Much of the contemporary Australian debate about the place of photography in public space is similarly linked not to particularly offensive photographs but to the uncontrolled circulation and consumption of inoffensive photographs. The cases that are cited in the discussion paper, “Unauthorised Photographs on the Internet and Ancillary Privacy Issues,” do not involve obscene or indecent photographs. ⁷⁵ The photograph of teenage rowers on the Melbourne riverbank was not an offensive image in itself, and injury was only experienced when it shifted from an honorific context to one of potential objectification. The photograph would not have caused offence if it circulated in the rowing team’s newsletter or amongst the boys’ friends on a Facebook page. However, when published on what was described in the media as a “gay website” it shifted into a sexual context. In its submission to the Attorneys-General Discussion Paper, the New South Wales Commission for Children and Young People consequently frames such breaches of privacy in terms of a breach in bodily integrity that leaves young people feeling degraded, shamed and humiliated. ⁷⁶

Although the extent to which these photographs may be considered harmful is contingent upon the context in which they are consumed rather than produced, due to the speed with which photographs can be moved from digital camera or camera phone to the internet, the gap between production and circulation has been reduced almost to an instant. On the web, honorific portraits may slip into the domain of repressive, objectified images with the click of a mouse. As a result, we are becoming increasing anxious about the act of being photographed without consent.

At the heart of this anxiety about photography and privacy is concern over what Helen Nissenbaum refers to as the “contextual integrity” of the photograph. ⁷⁷ Nissenbaum’s model of contextual integrity is put forward as a means of theorizing the possibility of privacy in public space, and relies on the idea that our sense of privacy is contingent upon particular contexts, circumstances and situations. For example, a pharmacy may be a public place, but we would consider it a breach of privacy if our request for a particular drug or ointment was recorded and publicly broadcast. We have a socially agreed up set of norms that determine acceptable uses of private information in different public contexts. Where these norms are respected, contextual integrity is maintained; and where they are violated, contextual integrity has been breached. ⁷⁸

On the surface, it seems as though photography’s capacity for contextual mobility would place it fundamentally at odds with this notion of privacy as contextual integrity. Regardless of whether it is digital or analogue, or taken by an artist, a photojournalist or an amateur, the act of taking a photograph involves cutting a moment out of its own temporal and spatial context and placing it in new ones. This power of photography is encapsulated in the description of the camera’s shutter as a “miniature guillotine” that slices an image from the world and places it in an unfamiliar context. ⁷⁹

The issue of consent has been put forward as a potential remedy to the invasion of privacy that this movement can cause. ⁸⁰ However, demands for consent would have a fatal impact on the spontaneity that is so central to street photography and photojournalism. Rex Dupain comments bluntly, “If you ask permission, you get either a ‘no’ or a contrived image.” ⁸¹ The value of street photography and photojournalism is that they operate in “the borderland between intrusion and observation.” ⁸² Moreover, it would be impractical to seek the permission of everyone who appears in a photograph taken in public. We can rarely clear public space in order to focus on our subject and our subject alone, and very often people may appear in a photograph simply because they share the same space as the intended subject. The messy legal ramifications of an insistence upon consent can be witnessed in France where photographers are legally obliged to gain permission of all people in a group photograph before its publication. ⁸³

My reason for underscoring photography’s contextual mobility within a discussion of privacy as contextual integrity is not to propose that we protect privacy by clamping down on photography’s movement and further regulating the production and circulation of photographs. Peter Coroneos, CEO of the Internet Industry Association, is amongst the many commentators to point out that if the test of photographic publication becomes contextual, laws will be extremely difficult to administer. ⁸⁴ Nissenbaum’s model is of interest precisely for the reasons that make it difficult to administer in law. Rather than presenting privacy as a kind of solid, self-evident fort that must be protected against “invasion,” Nissenbaum’s notion of privacy emphasizes how breaches of contextual integrity are inextricably linked to social conventions and norms. These norms are the product of context, are established socially and culturally, and are therefore always subject to change.

Contextual integrity operates at the boundaries through which social norms are defined, and photography’s contextual mobility makes visible the fluid and contingent qualities of these boundaries. An analysis of the paranoia surrounding photographs of children and families in public places in terms of breaches in contextual integrity would, for example, encourage us to investigate the social boundaries that are being policed through these calls for photographic restrictions. If we start accepting photography’s contextual mobility and acknowledge that privacy and contextual integrity are intimately tied to the construction of certain social norms and values, debate can be shifted away from the technological determinism and “othering” of photographers that have dominated media coverage, and towards an assessment of the impact of restrictions on photography on privacy and the public.

VI. Photography and its Publics

As the effects of anxieties about privacy and photography in public space extend well beyond the limits of the photograph’s frame, the fate of public photography cannot be assessed in isolation from a broader consideration of the changing nature of the public sphere, and our sense of ourselves as members of a public. The Discussion Paper proposes a series of legislative changes as a means of addressing these anxieties, including the creation of a new criminal offence to deal with the unauthorized use of photographs of children or with voyeurism where an expectation of privacy exists. ⁸⁵ However, while these debates take place, security guards and members of the public are taking the law into their own hands and policing photographic practises according to the mistaken assumption that privacy laws have been infringed.

A survey conducted by researchers at Monash University in partnership with the Centre for Contemporary Photography in 2010–11 is indicative of the impact of this problem on the photography community. ⁸⁶ Of the 261 Australian photographers who completed the survey, 74.7 percent reported being asked to stop taking photographs in public space. 15.9 percent of those had been threatened with physical harm during the process, 17.6 percent were threatened with legal action or arrest, and 26 percent were subject to demands that the photographs be deleted or film confiscated. Although “spy phones” ⁸⁷ and “perverts with mobile phone cameras” ⁸⁸ are targeted in much of the media coverage of this issue, it is telling that in this survey only one respondent was using a mobile phone camera when they were asked to stop photographing, and 76.3 percent were using an SLR. Moreover, these incidents appear to be on the rise. Although all of the confrontations occurred during the last ten years, 82 percent happened during the last three years. It seems that now a photographer is placed under suspicion simply for taking their camera out in public.

Amongst the 74.7 percent of people in the Monash/CCP survey who had been asked to stop taking photographs in public, most were approached either by private security guards (53.4 percent) or citizens (27 percent), rather than police. The reasons behind the objections were diverse: 27.2 percent noted security or terrorism concerns, 26.5 percent involved allegations that taking a photograph in that particular place was an offence, 14.8 percent reported that the property owner claimed exclusive rights to photograph in that area, 11.7 percent said the reason given was privacy concerns. The survey also indicated that there are no particular hot spots for confrontation or sites in which people feel more vulnerable, as suggested by the media’s focus on children’s play areas, swimming pools or beaches. 18.9 percent of confrontations took place in a suburban street, 17.6 percent in a city street, 14.9 percent in a shopping center, 14.9 percent in a railway station, just 4.1 percent on a beach, 2.7 percent in a public park, 1.4 percent in or around a school, and 1.4 percent at a public swimming pool. 24.3 percent of respondents cited “other” spaces, many noting that they had experienced confrontations at several of these sites. The impact of changing attitudes towards public photography are clearly being experienced in very concrete ways by photographers working in diverse public contexts in Australia, some privately owned and others not, yet we must also consider their larger implications for our experience of public life today and in the future.

It is troubling that these events have produced a tendency towards self-censorship amongst Australian photographers; 69.8 percent of respondents to this survey noted that the fear of being confronted or threatened has prevented them, on occasions, from taking photographs in public spaces, and 75.4 percent reported that the fear of being confronted or threatened has changed the way that they take photographs in public spaces. Sydney photographer, David Knight, has gone as far as stating that he has given up on beach photography altogether because he does not want to be labeled “as some sort of pervert.” ⁸⁹

These patterns of self-censorship reveal that as well as fostering an environment in which photographers are being targeted unlawfully for harassment and violence, anxieties about photography and privacy in public have other long-term social consequences. Photography has a long history as a tool for the formation and reformation of diverse aspects of public life. Social documentary photographers, such as Jacob Riis, Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, were motivated by the belief that looking at pictures of suffering and injustice would help to promote social reform. A sense of shared public life and shared responsibility underpinned their work in the hope that their photographs may foster empathy, mutual understanding and change as they held a mirror up to society. The emotive qualities of humanist documentary photography have been critiqued heavily since the 1970s by theorists such as Martha Rosler and Victory Burgin. Photographs of disempowered or disenfranchised peoples have been criticized in terms of a double violence in which these victims of economic exploitation are also made victims of the photographers’ and spectators’ voyeuristic gaze. However, despite this criticism, photography continues to have the power to help us negotiate public life and plays an important role in questioning the way we think about and define our realities.

In the more sympathetic commentaries on recent photography restrictions, their impact is often described with reference to iconic historical photographs that would not have been made in the current climate. Nick Ut’s photograph of a young naked girl fleeing a napalm attack, which galvanized support for anti-Vietnam War movements around the world in 1972, and Max Dupain’s celebrated Bondi and Newport series from the 1930s and 1950s are cited in an effort to throw into relief the historical, political and cultural value of photographs taken in public which may not have been made today. ⁹⁰ The potential loss of our future historical record is a major concern. The Australian documentary photographer and historian, John Williams laments the consequences of the current atmosphere of fear and suspicion, commenting on the legacy that it is leaving for future generations. ⁹¹ Like Williams, Duncan is troubled that photography restrictions will mean that we will leave future generations without a photographic record of life as it is lived and experienced in the early twenty-first century. In its place we risk being left with a plethora of highly polished and staged images. ⁹²

As important as it is to address this concern for the loss of historical records for the future, it is critical to also acknowledge how anxieties about photography in public are impacting on contemporary life, here and now. As street photography is circulating in ever more limited fields, we rarely have the opportunity to see images of each other in public space and witness how they dramatize larger social phenomenon such as notions of community and shared public life. While exhibitions of early and mid twentieth century social documentary and street photography attract large crowds, such as “Candid Camera: Australian Photography 1950s–1970s” presented in 2010 at the Art Gallery of South Australia or “Exposed – Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera” at the Tate Gallery in London in 2010, contemporary street photography is rarely shown in mainstream galleries.

The restrictions placed on photographers working in public and the resulting lack of engagement with street photography more broadly reflects and reinforces our larger withdrawal from the public realm as a shared social space. Alastair Hannay paints a grim view of the state of contemporary public life:

Being private is what people want positively to be. Whatever interest there is in public life is more than satisfied by what is relayed to them in their homes. . . . Public space, both physical and abstract, is a playground to which it can escape but is in reality no more than an extension of its private sphere; the forms of fulfillment it offers have nothing evidently to do with collective expressions of humanity. In the forum or elsewhere, once in the great outdoors private citizens remain essentially private. ⁹³

Today, the fear of lawsuits means that news footage and photographs taken in public spaces are more likely to be of anonymous people, shot from behind and faceless, than clear images of others’ faces. This process of obscuring the faces of those with whom we share public space may protect their privacy, but it is also a dehumanizing gesture that drastically delimits our opportunities for mutual recognition and identification. The experience of looking into the eyes of people in historical photographs and seeing ourselves is a powerful reminder of how photographs have a special ability to generate a sense of recognition with others in a manner that transcends time and space.

Rather than being willing participants in this social exchange or seeing ourselves as members of a public with shared responsibilities and obligations, the culture of individualism that underpins the fetishization of privacy encourages us to conceive of ourselves as competitive individuals, perpetually vulnerable to perceived threats against our privacy. Lacking a sense of shared public life, we retreat further into our private domains and treat anyone who attempts to intrude on that domain with suspicion. In commenting on the impact of this climate, the Melbourne-based photographer, Ponch Hawkes, refers to this sense of paranoia that is fostered in the media, noting: “crime figures are down but the news cycle is up.” ⁹⁴ Throughout her career, Hawkes has produced a number of celebrated photographic series about communities, families and friendships, and is concerned that the distorted perception of risk in contemporary society is creating an atmosphere of fear and alienation. The speed of global media ensures that we are made all too aware of crimes and traumatic events that occur well beyond our doorsteps. When we transform ourselves psychologically into potential victims of crime or perversion, it is a small imaginative leap to see a stranger with a camera as a threat against which we must be protected. “Nothing is more hopeless than a scared society,” states Williams, in response to this concerning turn. ⁹⁵ Rather than being eager to be a part of the photographic record of public life, when photographed in public this climate encourages us to feel like victims of an unnamed abuse or harm, all the while acquiescing to increased surveillance in which our own watching is policed by the gaze of security guards and other citizens.

These changes are occurring in a context in which our relation to the public, like the private, is shifting. Traditional realms for participation in public life, such as through political parties and local, state and federal government, are playing a less important role in an era of globalization and multinational organizations where the political management of major problems now frequently takes place. The media reminds us continually of the failings of politicians and our powerlessness in the face of multinationals, while globalization and technological development are presented as so vast and fast moving that they are beyond our control. It is not surprising that we are pessimistic about the public realm today. According to Bailey, the private is “asserting itself in the vacuum created by this public failure.” ⁹⁶

In response to these constrictions on public life, photographers and their supporters around the world are forming various “counterpublics” in which to assert their presence. Nancy Fraser famously defines counterpublics as “parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses, which in turn permit them to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs.” ⁹⁷ Photographers have found numerous means of bringing themselves and their messages into the public sphere, despite the restrictions. Arts Freedom Australia was formed by a small group of photographers and as well as its many individual members is now affiliated with industry bodies including the Australian Institute of Professional Photography, Australian Commercial and Media Photographers, Photo Imagining Council of Australia, Photo Marketing Association and the Federation of Camera Clubs. Originally, the group was organized in response to a desire for clarity over the often contradictory laws that restrict commercial and professional photography in sites such as beaches and national parks. However, today the concerns of members extend much further, and posts on the group’s blog describe instances of harassment directed at people simply wanting to photograph their own families in public places or pursue their hobby of street photography. Contributors to the AFA blog speak of defying bans on photography in certain public spaces and refusing to be intimidated when harassed by members of the public who become suspicious at the sight of their camera.

Similar protests have been held in the United Kingdom. The British Journal of Photography joined the cause in 2009, launching its “Not a Crime” campaign. The “Not a Crime” Facebook page notes that the project developed in response to “increasing concerns about terrorism, paedophilia, health and safety, personal privacy and plain old paranoia about pretty much anything Her Majesty’s subjects get up to [which] has resulted in a deep mistrust of photographers.” ⁹⁸ The campaign invited photographers to post a self-portrait together with a sheet of white card that proclaims “Not a crime” or “I am not a terrorist” to its Flickr group. These slogans became prominent in the streets of London in January 2010 when a group called “I’m a photographer, not a terrorist” rallied approximately 2,000 photographers, many carrying these signs, in Trafalgar Square to protest against police harassment.

The London Street Photography Festival and online forums such as the Flickr site “Hardcore Street Photography” combat negative perceptions of photography in public by stressing the social and cultural value of street photography. The 38,000 members of this international Flickr group suggest that an interest in the genre persists despite anxieties about privacy. If Paul Virilio is right and the screen has become the new village square, these online sites of resistance may prove productive. Although we should not look to the internet to replace traditional forms of public space, these alternative realms do make possible different forms of public action for photographers, and provide a means of reaching a large audience across a broad geographical area.

VII. Conclusion

The term “privacy” may be used in the media and in public discourse as a catch cry to support a variety of restrictions of photography in public, but it is important to acknowledge the complexity of privacy definitions and the particular subset of definitions that are at play in this issue. These concepts of privacy are bound to neoliberal discourses of individualism and their development coincided with the growth of photography as a potent means of self-definition. Other more recent developments in privacy discourse, such as the privatization of public space, also play a role in shifting perceptions and experiences of privacy in public.

While generalized claims for rights to privacy and freedom of expression are very easily spouted, when balancing the rights and social responsibilities of photographers with those of other members of the public we must not lose sight of these specificities. At hand is not simply a matter of a choice between right and wrong or good and evil, as those who attempt to couch photography restrictions in terms of child protection or terrorism prevention would have us believe. Instead, we are faced with conflicts between a series of rights or goods: a desire for self-definition, the need to maintain a healthy public life and the importance of leaving a historical record for future generations.

As these debates continue, we must also question whether the threat to our privacy that we perceive in photography can be averted without further restrictions on photographers, and consider the extent to which such restrictions would actually achieve the goal of protecting privacy. Existing laws have been designed to protect people against photographs taken in public that are offensive, defamatory, misleading or deceptive. It is difficult to see how further restrictions on photography can enhance our privacy when additional photography restrictions will have the primary effect of further regulating public space and placing us under additional surveillance and scrutiny. Rather than protecting us from harm, such photography restrictions would enhance the obsession with individualism that underpins anxieties about privacy and heighten the process that encourages us to see ourselves as victims of an array of public harms. At risk is not only the personal safety of photographers, both amateur and professional, but our future historical record, our sense of belonging to a larger public and the sense of well being, shared responsibility and safety that it brings.