Yes, I know the first two were also photos that I took. This one, you can just think of as “A photo you’d like to post”. This one I’m not quite as happy with as I am the previous two – the picture is off enough in very small ways that it bugs me – the seagull, the lack of perfect alignment, the little toning dodges I’ve had to apply, and so on. But given that it was essentially a snap I managed to get on the off-chance, in a two second window before someone walking behind me came into shot, and spoiled the rest of the effect, I’m still happy enough with it. One day, I’ll get around to getting up at 6am on a Saturday, and getting up there before anyone else is around, so I can take my time over it, and retake the thing. But until then, this is the best version of the shot that I’ve got, and I for all it frustrates me, I’m very happy I managed to get it.

I did consider using some news photography here – a famous photo of some atrocity or other, something like that – and talking about how angry it makes me, and generally using to day to raise awareness of something, but to be quite honest with you, I’m just not in the mood to get that worked up at the moment about things I don’t have to.

So instead, here’s another old photo of mine. The photo doesn’t really make me sad in and of itself, but I think the narrative it suggests – someone stopping to reflect on a blue heart on a wall must have a reason to do so, surely – hints at a sadness. Again, I’m just generally happy with this shot – there’s not really much I would have changed or done differently now.

One of two of my own photos I have hanging in my office. I love this bit of sculpture, and when I bought my first DSLR, I knew this was a photo I wanted to take. So I went and took it. It’s not a flawless composition, but it reflects a lot about the way I see the world and I am as happy with the light, colours and treatment of the subject in this photo as I am in any photo I’ve taken, which, given that I took it nearly five years ago is astonishing – I usually can’t stand my work only a few days after taking the picture. That this one is still one I take pleasure in on a daily basis is something I am very happy about.

As is probably eyeball-searingly obvious, I am against it with the kind of incandescent rage I normally reserve for bigots, morons and people who attempt to take away my coffee. There are a lot of negative things I could say about America, but not matter what else they’ve done, they got one thing so, so right, and that’s their First Amendment. It doesn’t guarantee that the government won’t fuck with the freedom of the press, but it makes it quite a lot harder for them to do so.

We in Britain, of course, have had to make do with an implied constitution, as enumerated by the courts, based on case law and very old bits of paper. It’s a shaky thing, and does not stand up well to the government fucking with things. And so they have. And I’m not entirely at a loss to understand why they’ve given the police more and more power to curb my freedom to point a camera at whatever I damn well please.

Here’s a tedious truth: 90% of policemen are just doing their job. And 100% of policemen are only human. So, yeah, I am sure it’s a bit wearing to have some soap dodging hippy shouting at you and picking a fight, only to be pilloried in the court of public opinion when you chin the bastard. I even think there’s an argument to be made that people’s respect for the police diminishes when every minor infraction by every single officer is brought into the light, and that that’s corrosive on a number of levels. Don’t get me wrong: I have not suddenly become stupid or confused: the blame for said corrosion lies squarely with the officers who do these stupid things. But the fact remains: they are plastered everywhere, and it erodes the public’s faith in the police, most of whom are decent people trying to do a difficult job. And if it’s wearing to be shouted at by a hippy, how wearing must it be to be judged not by your own actions, but by the worst actions of one of your colleagues?

Do I think that any of this is even close to outweighing the need for a free press? Absolutely not. Do I think it’s outweighed by everyone’s right to broadly, do as they please as long they’re not hurting anyone. No. But I can understand why the police might wish not to be constantly under the lens – it makes an already shitty and difficult job 20 times more difficult.

The police have to be 100% accountable. It may make their jobs harder. It may it hard to get the right sort of people to sign up. There are answers to this, chiefly to do with raising the salary of officers. I do find it disturbing that I, who basically contribute nothing to society (other than paying my taxes) get paid nearly twice the starting salary for a police office. (Or ambulance worker, or fireman, or nurse or teacher or blah blah blah.)

But I’ve digressed a bit.

So: the police and photography. And the threat of terrorism.

Look, you’re all informed people. You all know how stupid this is. Teaching people that individuals with cameras are suspect is one of the most patently ridiculous things I’ve ever heard of, up there with “Jesus loves you” and “a watched pot never boils”. I have done science experiments, and I can confirm that a watched pot does indeed boil, and that Jesus only said he loved me to get me into bed.

But here’s the thing: the more the police misapply these powers, they more obviously ridiculous they’ll be seen to be. So take your camera with you everywhere, photography anything you watch to, and any time anyone hassles you about it, be polite and respectful, co-operate fully, make sure you get all the relevant paperwork, document it fully and publicly, and write to your MP about it. And tell Cory Doctorow.

So I get a little exercised when people try and tell me I can’t take photos when I know I have that right. I am of course, profoundly fucked off about all the anti-photography measures that have recently become law here. But the other day, I have an amusing experience with a security guard who told me that I did not have the right to take photos of the building that he was security guarding – The Shell Centre on the South Bank.

Well, I say it was amusing. It was, but that’s because I’m a six foot skinhead in a biker jacket. People tend to pay attention when I assert my rights in a calm and reasonable tone of voice, so when I said that actually, I was completely allowed to take photos, whatever he said, he went off to get his supervisor. By the time they returned, I had taken the few snaps I was amusing myself with, and was on my way. Had I been someone smaller, or less sure of themselves, their assertion of authority might have worked on me, and it would have been much less funny.

Honestly, I hadn’t really planned on putting the photos on-line. They’re hardly great pictures. But I’ll be fucked in the ear with a rusty butter knife if I let some jumped up little shit with the fake authority of a petrochemical giant tell me what I can and can’t do.

So there’re three shots up on flickr, under the widest Creative Commons License I could find. In the unlikely event anyone needs images like that, please, use them and become very rich.

Yeah, in the grand scheme of things this is hardly sticking it to the man. But still: if anyone fancies passing the link to this entry around, that’d be very kind of you. When photographers rights are being encroached left and right as it is, I think it’s important to take a stand, however small and irrelevant for those rights that we have left.

So: if you’re passing The Shell Centre, stop and take a few photos, why don’t you?

He’d visited the Greenwich Maritime Museum, full of hundred-year-old sextants, and even older devices that people used to find their way around the world before we all had satnav on our dashboards, and was struck by the “no photography” signs everywhere. Surely, he thought, most of these things cannot possibly be in copyright? Surely the museum cannot prevent others reproducing them if they so desire?

So he asked about it. No, they weren’t in copyright. No, there was nothing there likely to be damaged by a camera’s flash. The musuem just wanted to safeguard it’s postcard sales, and prevent people from taking any mementos home that they did not have to pay for.

Doctorow makes the passionate, strident, and quite correct argument that this is a complete betrayal of everything a good museum should stand for.

Copyright (ostensibly) exists to ensure that a creator is fairly recompensed in their lifetime. It exists to ensure that there is an incentive for people to produce the artifacts and technologies that shape our culture. But it runs out for a reason – because these things are too valuable to be allowed to remain in the possession of any one person or institution.

Which is of course, also the reason we have museums and art galleries. They provide places that the public can see, interact with, and be inspired by these things. They are the custodians of our culture. Doctorow’s argument is that by preventing photography, especially just because they want the money, the museums are betraying that trust in a massive and disgusting manner.

The argument, is of course, not that simple. Museums are expensive things to run – the cost of curating, preserving, and securing these objects is enormous, and most of them (in the UK, anyway) don’t charge, or don’t charge much for access. Surely there’s a reasonable argument to be made that their attempts to force cash out of people are quite justified?

Well, only up to a point, in my view. I firmly believe that you can accurate judge a culture’s level of civilization by how it treats its libraries and museums. If the museums are expensive to run, that’s not an reason to allow them to attempt to crowbar more money out of the public, that’s a reason to give them more public money.

But even aside from that argument, there is of course the possibility that the museum is simply not allowed to permit photography on certain works – that they remain in copyright, and that the museum has no choice but to disallow photography, under the terms that the owner or creator has allowed them to be exhibited under.

But on the other hand, surely it’s mostly Modern Art that this would apply to? And surely Modern Art has the least leg to stand on? Even aside from the fact that most of these works have been photographed over and over again, turning up in all sorts of media-related discussions, there’s a sizeable body of modern art that is derived from reproducing (or even simply appropriating and re-presenting) other people’s work – from Warhol’s Brillo Boxes to Duchamp’s Fountain. Surely it’s the height of hypocrisy for the owners of this body of art to attempt to prevent it’s reproduction and remixing into new forms?