Photo by Brian Auer

Here’s a twist on the usual formula. Instead of being stopped by police while taking a photo, Mohammed Hanif writes in today’s Guardian about being stopped while getting his photo taken on a public street in London.

Hanif was posing for an author photo for a book he had just written when a security guard told them they had to leave. Ultimately they were booted from three other sites before finding a church where no one bothered them.

To London authorities, this type of activity amounts to a security risk and, accordingly, they’ve decided to make the whole process as laborious as possible. The nearly Byzantine rules in place require photographers to not only apply for a permit to shoot on public streets and wait up to a month for approval, but then they have to wear a radio-wave emitting tag while shooting. So they can be tracked.

Hanif asks:

Why would a potential terrorist (or people exhibiting suspect behaviour, as the Met likes to describe them in its anti-terror publicity) pose in front of an organic cosmetics stall and religiously follow the instructions of a white, female professional photographer who looked nothing if not an infidel?

But you see, it’s much easier to enact a very rigid, blanket law to outlaw any and all activity than evaluate cases on an individual basis and allow society to continue under some semblance of normalcy.

UPDATE: Thanks to Byron, who tells us the information in Hanif’s essay about the permit requirement and tracking device are not true and were actually part of an April Fool’s Day joke. Which means, thankfully, we are not living in Orwell’s 1984. Yet.

Article from The Guardian.