From Shoot Experience

Shoot Experience, a company promoting street photography and street photography events, assigned six photographers different areas of the City, the business district of London, to photograph. They were instructed to keep to public land and photograph the area as they would on a normal day. The aim was to explore the policing of public and private space by private security firms and their reaction to photographers.

I’ve said before that incidences between photographer and security guards, public-space personnel (museums, galleries, swimming pools) and shop attendants reveal a wide mistrust of photographers. The security guards in the Shoot Experience video repeatedly state that photographers can’t take pictures of privately owned buildings from public spaces. That is worrying. It’s almost as if the buildings have become people, with a right to privacy. How did this happen? Why are security personnel citing the Terrorism Act? These ideas, that photographers are essentially up to no good, become attached to one another, ideas about terrorism, about private property, about copyright and privacy law, about libel, about paedophilia; they end up attracting and propagating each other and forming comprehensive systems of suspicion. It’s enough to say that perhaps no one invented them. They just become accepted as the normal order of things.

It is, of course, nonsense. Photographers have the right to take pictures of any building they like as long as it’s from a public space. The only instance where photographing a building is not allowed, from my own experience, is the MI6 building in Vauxhall. On the other hand, if you’re taking a photo from land that is privately owned, such as a garden or house, the owners can place any restrictions they like on entry, which is why some museums, galleries, National Trust, English Heritage and other institutions have ‘No Photography’ signs displayed. You also need a permit to photograph in parks, particularly royal ones, like Windsor, but the National Trust does not charge for permission to shoot on its landscape and coastline properties.

It isn’t an infringement of copyright to take a picture of a building, or incidentally including a copyright work in a photograph, You can photograph buildings, or a building that is a work of architecture, or sculptures, or works of artistic craftsmanship that are situated on a permanent basis in a public place.

Also interesting in the video is when one building manager makes the distinction between photography for ‘private collection’, and, I assume, photography for commercial gain. Again, this is nonsense. Taking a photograph of artwork (being a copy of the artwork), or a close-up of a company’s logo, on private display is copyright infringement. However, if the logo is an incidental part of the image and if you’re taking the photo from a public place, it doesn’t matter whether it’s for commercial or private use.

A security guard states that the police advise him to approach photographers. I’m chasing this up with the City of London police right now.

One security guard says the photographer can’t film staff entering or leaving a building. This is not true.

One security guard cites the Terrorism Act. He’s referring to the Terrorism Act 2000. While the stop and search powers of Section 44 have been scrapped, section 43 states that police officers (not security personnel) have the power to stop and search a person whom they reasonably suspect to be a terrorist.

This is from the MET website:

“The purpose of the stop and search is to discover whether that person has in their possession anything which may constitute evidence that they are a terrorist.

“Officers have the power to view digital images contained in mobile telephones or cameras carried by a person searched under S43 of the Terrorism Act 2000 to discover whether the images constitute evidence that the person is involved in terrorism. Officers also have the power to seize and retain any article found during the search which the officer reasonably suspects may constitute evidence that the person is a terrorist. This includes any mobile telephone or camera containing such evidence.

“Officers do not have the power to delete digital images or destroy film at any point during a search. Deletion or destruction may only take place following seizure if there is a lawful power (such as a court order) that permits such deletion or destruction.”

The power to enforce this revolves around the word ‘reasonable’. As long as you explain your intentions and why you’re photographing, there shouldn’t be any reason to stop and search you. However, the civil liberties organisation Liberty believes that this power is already overly broad and open to challenge on the grounds that it is inconsistent with Article 8 (respect for privacy) of the Human Rights Act 1998.

The potential for stand off is large. Photographers don’t like being asked to move on, and security people have been told (by their bosses) to come out and confront photographers. So their job is on the line. The onus here is as much on the photographer as the security person to be polite.

It should be noted that none of the police in the video were bothered by the photographers photographing on a public space.

I always ask three questions if stopped by an official in a public place:

1) Under what law are you stopping me?

2) What do you think I’m going to do? (Specifically, are they simply trying to deter, delay or inconvenience you?)

3) What will you do if I carry on taking pictures?

I state my rights. This is from the Metropolitan Police website:

“Members of the public and the media do not need a permit to film or photograph in public places and police have no power to stop them filming or photographing incidents or police personnel.”

One security guard in the film asks the videographer to stop filming. If someone asks you to stop recording them, and you’re in a public place, you should obviously use your discretion, particularly if children are involved. However, the request can’t be enforced from a legal basis. Clearly though, if you continue photographing or filming, physical violence may follow …

The Piccadilly Community Centre, once a bank designed by Edwin Lutyens and until very recently a gallery run by Hauser & Wirth, is fully functioning – and I didn’t realise that it is, in fact, an installation. Entering on Piccadilly, I was fooled by the public-space feel, rather like my local library. Subtle hints that something’s not quite right are everywhere though, if you look hard enough. A bank poster in Polish, and the much-too-attractive girls sitting in attendance on every floor, one reading a novel by Irish Murdoch, are a give away. As is the beer tap in the basement bar that doesn’t work, and the untidy squat in the attic where discarded beer cans, ashtrays and dirty mattresses are just a little bit too, well, ‘placed’. The squat’s two TVs, both on, are also rather nineties for today’s Apple-Mac-owning hipster-squatters.

The installation’s ultra-realism is also its surrealism: stepping through a door in the basement marked ‘Private’ I rounded a narrow, tight corner in the former bank vault. On all sides I was surrounded by workmen’s tools and bric-a-brac, or über-trendy paraphanalia, depending on how you see it, and, at the last corner, I came across a small bed with porn mags. It was bizarre, and unnerving. Had I accidentally invaded someone’s personal space?

A chat with one of the attendants (the Iris Murdoch reading one) reveals it’s the work of Swiss artist Christoph Büchel, whose previous installations include a prison for the Lockerbie bomber at Glasgow’s Tramway, and an installation at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art that included a 35ft oil tanker and a two-storey house. The centre is designed to be functional: advertised on a white board downstairs are tea mornings and fencing classes for O.A.P.s. On the second floor is a fully operational charity shop.

Is the Piccadilly Community Centre an example of ‘good’ participatory art? After all, it provides a social service. But the installation’s ‘slice-of-life’ realism nags; itself a device, it represents a desire to turn away from perceived sterility and falseness in ‘art’. It’s the endless argument between the real and the virtual, and the centre offers no way out: like its basement labyrinth, the work is just reconstructing and remaking, but with the perceived function of inventing a formal solution to social problems. However there is no ‘real’ Piccadilly Community Centre because this show will close on 30 July 2011, along with the unresolved social contradiction it purports to resolve. The imaginary dream of a community centre realised for a short time in Piccadilly, and providing a real social service, covers up the lack of ideological-egalitarian mechanisms – the space is owned and run by Hauser & Wirth, a global gallery with huge resources, and Piccadilly, because it is so expensive to live there, has few residents who might truly benefit from a social drop-in centre. The press pictures (one is above) show this lie: are these O.A.P.s from the local area, or have they been shipped in? And if they are, why the need for performance? Another press picture shows a hula-hooping policeman.

The conflict then is between a universalist, standardised ‘art’ appropriate to the range of the task demanded by the social mores of the art world, and industrial mass society, and a personalised language that expresses the alienation of the individual in London. As an imaginary resolution to alienation, it answers to the same problem that Don Quixote found when acting out his imaginary world to find his place in it. The imaginary is both reassuring and blind. There’s a lot of empty talk about aesthetic playfulness while social antagonism is obliterated. If you argue against this, you’re accused of not getting the joke. Which is only really a joke aimed at a select few in the art scene, myself included, a joke circulating around the same few faces.

As Jacques Rancière says, the history of modern art has been its attempt to escape itself in order to transform the reality of things. The Piccadilly Community Centre is an example of a relational art: an art that no longer seeks to create works, just situations and relations, offering society small services suitable to repairing gaps in social relations. The content of the work appeals to a sentimental and popular understanding of what it means to ‘do good’ – ie, old people deserve our altruism and there’s no real way to argue against that (because if you reject the premise, you reject what’s considered, consensually, to be ‘good’).

By combining popular art (the community centre, the charity shop) with high art (the work’s endorsement by Hauser & Wirth), the installation reinforces the distinction (between popular and high art) it purports to undermine. Especially since the work is inserted into the art market as ‘authored’. Social work in community centres does the same, but it’s not authored. So the work becomes a provocation: designed for the media, hiding its true relation to the entertainment industry to which art increasingly belongs.

I’d like to illustrate, by way of an example, just how social antagonism never really goes away in these spaces, but rather lurks just beneath the surface. While I was there, I’d wanted to take a photo of the main room, but as I was holding up my camera, an attendant (not the Iris Murdoch one) jumped up shouting ‘can you ask the permission of the people in the room before you take a photo.’ And I felt awful. I thought her response particularly aggressive and unkind and I immediately felt like I was this evil photographer, intent on stealing the souls of the people in the space. I’d only wanted to capture a sense of the atmosphere: my photo was of nobody in particular. And, after all, I thought, was the room purporting to be a public space, or not? Suddenly it felt like so many so-called public spaces in Britain. They are actually private, with somebody never far away to question, or stop, or take the details of the photographer trying to take an, often, innocent picture, as if the photographer stands against the very ethos and spirit of the public arena. In fact, the person questioning, or stopping, or taking details is acting, unawares, to protect private property; or is simply representing the state’s desire to control its citizens.

So I asked, quite happily, the dozen or so people in the room if they’d mind me taking a photo. One chap said he did, and a woman asked me what it was for. I replied that the photo was for me, and the woman seemed happy with that, but I thought because I might use the photo on this blog, I’d better keep her out of the frame. I moved to the back of the room, just as the chap said ‘thank you’ to the irate attendant for telling me off. So, excluding the woman from the frame, I asked the chap who’d objected whether he’d mind if I included his back. He said he didn’t.

Now, I can understand the man’s response. But he was one of many people in the room, and I wonder if I’d taken a photo of a general street scene and he’d walked past, whether he’d have objected in quite the same way. Also, there was a CCTV camera in the corner of the room. I assume it was recording him as well. I didn’t hear him object to that.

And there was nothing participatory about the attendant’s irate response. I felt I was immediately excluded from the social, open feel of the room and hurled into a zone of private indignation and antagonism directed towards photographers. But, actually, the only people who seemed to mind out of the dozen people present were the irate attendant and the objecting man.

Social antagonism is glossed over by the aesthetic playfulness of this installation, a playfulness directed at a small group of gallery goers, but the antagonism was brought to the fore by an angry attendant. It was a reminder that behind the façade of the social, participatory project, we’re still in London, and we’re still very much alienated from each other.

Arles 2011

Images © Julian Lass 2011

‘Martin Parr and Erik Kessels gave us a guided tour of their show, From Here On. And the artists gave a little explanation of what they were trying to do with the work. But that was an hour and a half and then I went into the next show, where there’s hundreds of photo books published in 2010-11 and the Discovery Awards, where there’s 15 photographers. And there’s just so much stuff, I was completely overwhelmed, I had to come out and have a drink and sit down. I’m traumatised. Traumatised by photography books. In the Congo they’re traumatised by war. Here, it’s too much culture.’

‘I shared a taxi with Andreas Gursky from the airport to Arles. I’m not really into art photography so I didn’t know who he was. I was asking him what he did, and he said he was a photographer and that he was working on some seascapes. And he said he had a gallery in New York, and I said “good for you mate” and I asked him whether he’d ever sold any prints. And he said, yes he had. Later I found out that his prints sell for $3m. What was his name again? Bursky? I can’t believe I asked him if he ever sold any prints.’