Link: http://www.elstreedv.co.uk/photography

As a photographer, I am often asked to take general shots around London. Shots of buildings, the river, a few theatres, you know London life and culture. These shots end up in online newsletters and websites. Recently I have been coming across the bizarre situation of being turfed out of “private property” upon which you need written permission to take photographs.

Now I understand that we live in dangerous times and having the police ask me who I am and why I’m taking photographs seems fair enough to me. But how come private landlords seem to think they have the power to prevent you from recording reflected light onto a digital device. It’s not as if these places are closed to the general public. Today it was Canary Wharf. Apparently (or so I was told be the private army who descended on me three clicks into my mornings work) the whole 97 acres that constitute Canary Wharf are private property, including the roads and the access to the river.

Now if this is a private land then I have many questions about why the taxpayers of London are providing a tube station to serve this Fiefdom. I would like to know why the planners gave away our rights to walk down to the river and take a few photographs (albeit for commercial purposes). Does anybody actually know the law on this? Has anyone actually tested it in the courts? Do these private companies have the right to stop people taking photographs on what is their freehold even though that freehold is open to the general public?

I quite understand that if you pay admission to see someone perform then taking a whacking great camera and flashing away at Amy Whinehouse from the front row is not on. Especially if the likelihood is that you will be flogging your possibly unflattering snaps to the highest bidder even if that is Ebay. But surely that is a very different matter to being out and about in public thoroughfares. On another recent occasion I was booted off another so called private city square by warlords landlords of the estate even though the building I was photographing was entirely leased by my client who had asked me to take photographs of the said building! Why, what law is in place that gives these people the right to say I can’t take a camera and press the shutter while poking the lens at one of their buildings? What would happen if I went home with my photographic memory and painted a fabulous work of art (apart from my loved ones having a heart attack because I’d been taken over by Martians with talent). Would that be a problem? Would my perfect representation taken from my memory and transferred dot by painstaking dot from my mind to my canvas be any different to my Canon EOS5D regurgitating its flash memory to my computer?

My next example was being in Oxford with a video camera and on discovering a church, which had a very high walkway around its upper levels I tried to pay my (£4!) entry fee and ascend to capture some of the dreaming spires. Oh no. It’s not allowed! If I had a hand held palm camera then that’s OK but if I’m using a professional video camera then oh no, I need a chit from god. WHY? What am I going to do? Make videos about about devil worship in Oxford. Take stills from it and try to sell them outside the church stopping people from buying the perfectly nice cards that they have in their shop? Get a grip you don’t own the view! – only the bricks and mortar that take me up to it. So what do you want to stop me doing? Carrying a working video camera? being in possession of a viable miniDV? You’d think they would be delighted: “look at the view from this church” I’d be saying, “isn’t it spectacular” and they only want four quid to go up there for 10 minutes.

Sarcasm, levity and my obvious dislike for jobsworths (employed by a deity or not) aside, please, can someone tell me the facts? What ridiculous laws allow for these ultimately paranoid companies to tell me what reflected light I can record. This must be tested.

Ray Burnside
Photographer
ElstreeDV
http://www.elstreedv.co.uk