It is Sunday, July 18, 2060:

Old-Timers’ Day, Yankee Stadium.

You’re here with your old photoglove, getting some action shots from your seat in the upper deck without even putting down the $40 beer in your left hand. What would look to us like normal sunglasses are in fact camera-equipped goggles with a heads-up display on the inside of the right lens.

Pointing the index finger of the photoglove, which is impregnated with tiny pyramid-shaped crystal microlenses surrounding nano-sized image sensors, you draw a frame around each bit of action so that a window appears to float in front of your goggles.

Blink: You bat your right eye to capture pictures of 86-year-old Derek Jeter throwing out the first pitch from deep center field, demonstrating his newly regenerated shoulder muscle.

Blink: A suicide squeeze.

Blink: A diving catch.

Applause is muted because the whole stadium is full of people pointing and winking at the field.

Back home, you begin to edit your pictures using a surround-vision display. The merging of the computer and the camera has brought computational photography to fruition, so it doesn’t much matter that batters were distant and sometimes had their backs to you, because, using your glove, you captured a complete three-dimensional image of the players via thousands of tiny, wireless, GPSenabled microcams that have been spread like glitter all over the field.

Choose an image from a 2D desktop display and it appears before you in 3D, lifesize, projected into an invisible fog from at least six laser projectors mounted in the walls. A joystick with a trigger and thumb buttons lets you change focal plane and depth of field, zoom in for close-ups, even alter the angle of view. Each picture is actually a few seconds of 3D video, since when you blinked the recording of that scene began five seconds before the blink and continued five seconds after. At 1,000 frames per second, each “capture” gives you the choice of separately viewing-and walking completely around-10,000 stills or replaying the action as if you were positioned on the field…

Based on current research directions, this is one possible photo future.

Where photography goes from here depends not just on what dedicated shooters want, but maybe more so on the whims of a billion app-happy cellphone junkies, each one of whom is already getting a much better camera every time they upgrade. The increasing miniaturization and simultaneous expansion of camera capabilities is now driving the outer edges of the photo frontier.

Where will it go? A number of possible tracks are discernible, but the widest vector leads toward increasing the camera’s lightgathering function by several orders of magnitude.

“It’s all about getting more information from the image sensor,” explains Abbas El Gamal, an electrical engineering professor at Stanford University, whose research group has been developing ways to make CMOS sensors both smaller and more sensitive, capable of providing depth maps for super-3D image capture.

Though photographs in the near future will still be composed by people holding cameras, it will gradually become more accurate to say pictures were computed rather than “taken” or “captured.”

But this requires broadening the dynamic range of light and motion detectable by the sensor chip. “Without information,” says El Gamal, “there is no hope.”

Within this context, clues from current research in the realm of computational photography, combined with the predictions made by electrical engineers and technology visionaries, can be projected along a future timeline of what we can reach for-and maybe even grasp:

2015 Into The Next Dimension

There are 300 million cellphones in America, all of them containing increasingly sophisticated cameras. Pixels have gotten so small that 50MP point-and-shoots are common, and there are pro cameras in the gigapixel range.

High-def video is quickly evolving into 3D, jump-started in 2004 by the establishment of the global Network of Excellence in 3DTV, an eddy of manufacturers and researchers, including Holografika, Mitsubishi, Philips, Texas Instruments, and some two dozen others.

“You know how when you think of the past, you see it in black-andwhite images?” says Nils Lassiter, an application engineer with Photron, a maker of ultra-highspeed video cameras. “In the future, thinking of the past will bring up 2D images, as if people were flat back then.”

European Union-funded R&D on “autostereo” 3DTV-which doesn’t require colored glasses to combine the two images required for traditional stereoscopy-has been focused on head-tracking, an extension of face-detection technology. Laser-based holographic projection, sending separate images from the display to each eye of the viewer (or multiple viewers), is just entering the market.

Still photos are following that lead toward autostereo 3D representation based on head-tracking that’s built into the picture frame. Photographic prints on paper are competing with progressively thinner wireless 3D interactive display screens.

2020 Rise Of The Organic Camera

The trend toward using one iPhone-like device for multiple wireless tasks has almost peaked as the use of cameras declines, even though compacts are now the size of pocket change. (Pro cameras are about the size they were in 2009, but the multiplicity of lenses has been replaced by a single omni-lens.)

“At first, there will be one device for everything,” explains Ramesh Raskar, associate professor at the MIT Media Lab who is co-director of the Center for Future Storytelling. “Later it will fragment all over the body, the camera to the eye, the phone and audio to the ear. Some people will have them implanted, some not.”

Lenses have shrunk and moved closer to merging completely with image sensors, which are now mostly based on organic (carbon-based) compounds and nano-sized organic photo diodes. The sensor’s flexibility allows it to be formed into spherical shapes, more closely resembling and functioning like the human retina.

“The spherical sensor gives you a very wide field of view, with everything in focus, similar to what the human eye sees,” says Daniel Palanker, associate professor of ophthalmology at Stanford University. “Lenses will always be important because you cannot capture a picture without good focus. Today, we require expensive and bulky lens elements to correct for the curvature of the focal plane. But if you instead use a spherical sensor, you can capture sharp images with much less expensive optics.”

Breakthroughs in the power and miniaturization of solar cells have produced microbatteries that last for years without recharging. Deuterium, derived from seawater, has become the go-to isotope for power, but bio-batteries (which amplify the electrical charge emitted by bioengineered bacteria) and air batteries (based on the interaction of a lithium, zinc, or aluminum compound with oxygen molecules in the atmosphere) are on the horizon.

2030 In The Eye Of The Beholder

The fragmentation of wireless capabilities begins to take the camera and the phone out of people’s hands, attaching or implanting the rice-grainsized machines to their eyes and earlobes.

Competing for market share are light, wraparound sunglasses with 4D lightcapture capabilities. This means a thin layer of image sensors can now record not just the color and intensity of the visible spectrum, but also the direction and angle of reflected light in the wider spectrum, including ultraviolet and infrared.

You frame a photograph by holding your extended forefingers and thumbs in front of you, like an artist composing the outlines of a painting. Tripping the “shutter”- now really just a “save” function- can be done with a verbal command, such as “Click.”

Algorithms are computing a visual version of surround sound, allowing images to be viewed from perspectives other than where the camera was actually located. Photos are now almost identical to what the eye sees, but are also “relightable,” which means making compromises to achieve high dynamic range is no longer an issue.

Depth of field is controllable, letting viewers, rather than photographers, see their own versions of the photo. “Photos can be displayed in a way that reflects your mood,” says Ramesh Raskar of the MIT Media Lab.

Blurring of an image due to motion is both correctable and replayable as the “film-rooted distinction between ‘still’ cameras and ‘video’ cameras,” disappears, as in a prediction in the STAR (State of the Art) research report on computational photography published in 2006 in the journal Eurographics.

Photography and holography have now merged, requiring something more than flat screen displays. FogScreen, an early-21stcentury company whose patented “immaterial” display is a free-floating screen of dry fog you can walk through, has seen its technology evolve into 6D panoramic displays filling whole rooms in which the viewer can walk around freely among projected images. These “immersive” displays have further blurred the line between real and virtual existence.

2040-2050 Images With A Wave Of A Wand

The camera as a device you carry has completely disappeared. Image sensors have become part of the literal fabric of everyday life, woven into gloves and photo cloth, which produce 3D images after you rub them over an object such as a human face.

We now have “camera wallpaper” and live Google Earth, which records continuously and allows the viewer to remotely select and experience virtually any public scene in the world. Displays have become tiny laser projectors beaming images directly onto your retina.

Matt Hirsch, a graduate student in the field of information ecology at MIT, foresees “painting” a photograph by waving “a tiny wand containing an infrared laser and terabytes of data storage,” he says.

“Cameras in the environment will work collectively to image the scene from your perspective, and from other perspectives of interest, and then transfer the resulting data to your wand. You could then dial back from this point to see the scene at other times in the past.”

Image sensors encased in microlenses and connected to GPS receivers are now sprinkled like confetti almost everywhere. The concept of privacy is in flux and widely disputed. Researchers are getting close to being able to tap directly into the neural pathways of vision in your eyes and brain, accessed by an external probe held gently against the temple, like those used today for ultrasound imaging. Everything you see is now downloadable.

The concept of the camera as an actual object is so 2009.

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If you can’t see it, you can’t shoot it. Though the eyes and brain make up only about two percent of your total body weight, they eat up 25 percent of your nutrient load. Eyes are thirsty sponges of whatever gets near them, so expect to triple the risk of cataracts and macular degeneration if you smoke, and beware of too much yakking on mobile phones. Cell phone radiation has been shown in scientific studies to damage the cornea, lens, and retina of the eyes of mammals.
The easy way to maximize eye health is to eat right, though the National Eye Institute’s Age-related Eye Disease Study (AREDS) has shown that taking a specific formulation of antioxidants and zinc every day can help reduce the risk of macular degeneration by at least 25 percent. Here it is, straight from the Feds-

500mg vitamin C
400 IU vitamin E
15mg beta-carotene, or 25,000 IU vitamin A
80mg zinc oxide
2mg copper, as cupric acid

Eating and drinking for your eyes involves getting more than enough-six or seven milligrams per day-of the plant pigments lutein and zeaxanthin. Taking lutein supplements hasn’t proven effective, though moderate amounts of red wine consumption have been linked to lower risk of age-related eye problems. Food sources of anti-oxidants are always best.

A word of caution about medications: most of them have ocular side effects. Benadryl can cause retinal bleeding, Prozac can cause eye pain and cataracts, and Pepcid may cause internal eye bleeding. Even Rogaine can decrease visual acuity. The bumper sticker lesson for photographers: stuffed-up, bummed-out, dyspeptic baldies who eat right do it better.

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When Robert Burch discovered that an online travel agency was ripping off four photos he’d shot in Ghana, he didn’t just get mad. He got a court order. Last summer, a federal judge in New York awarded the Quebec-based photographer $64,866 for the unauthorized use of his copyrighted images. Collecting that money, though, may be impossible. And don’t even get Burch started on the 535 websites (his latest count, as of late November) that have used his images without permission.

Since capturing virtually any digital picture is just a right-click and Save-As away, the web has become a free-take zone. Whole collections of pictures on Flickr.com have been copied and sold by out-and-out thieves. And stock agencies are taking strong measures to convert infringers into paying customers or face a judge.

For example, several stock agencies have hired a company named PicScout to use its advanced image recognition software to trawl the web for matches of copyrighted photos. The company estimates that nine out of every ten uses of copyrighted images are unauthorized.

Victor Perlman, general counsel of the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP), says, “Photographs are potentially extremely valuable, and you may not even know it at the time.”

How valuable? A study last fall by the stock photo industry estimated $67 million lost in a year’s worth of infringements just on Getty Images’ million or so rights-managed pictures.

Once a photo is posted somewhere by somebody who doesn’t own it, the image often ends up on dozens of other websites across a span of industries from real estate to travel. Many have become part of web design templates that keep echoing through cyberspace. The legal argument that widespread stealing amounts to de facto public domaining has become a common tactic in defense of inadvertent infringements.

Ounce of Protection

All your pictures receive copyright protection the moment you snap them. In theory, at least, you’re entitled to actual damages, punitive damages, and the profits from the unauthorized use of the picture.

But if you don’t officially register your photos or film clips with the U.S. Copyright Office and they’re used without your permission, good luck finding a lawyer to take your case. Neither can you collect statutory damages (up to $150,000 per infringement, though judges often knock off a zero). For real protection, registration is the only route.

Even amateurs should do it. “You have the responsibility to register your work,” urges Seth Resnick, past president of the Editorial Photographers association. “If you don’t, it makes it harder for those who do to enforce their copyrights. It’s easy to copy photos from the web, the thieves know that 95 percent aren’t registered, and there’s little done if they’re caught. With so many not registering, it shrinks the risk/reward ratio for stealing.”

Not that a copyright actually stops unauthorized use. Robert Burch claims his twilight picture of a Ghanaian monument (on the next spread) has been infringed more than 100 times since 1998. “I can’t sell that picture now — its value has been destroyed,” he says. “In 10 years I’ve spent $25,000 to $30,000 trying to protect my pictures, and I’ve recovered maybe $14,000 or $15,000.”

He received death threats after winning his case against the online travel website, and he expects the only way he’ll ever see a dime of the $64,866 he was awarded is through property seizures from the defendant.

Burch tries to do everything by the book, but it doesn’t always work out. His contract with a group of Ghanaian musicians promised them half of any payments from selling the photos. So when they see their faces everywhere and ask for their money, he has to tell them the images were stolen. “I look like a liar,” he says.

Burch’s website, burchcom.com, is encrypted now by WebCrypt Pro. And he routinely hunts for picture thieves by using image-recognition software from Idée Inc., tracking the ISP addresses of frequent visitors to his website, and performing Google image searches on subjects he’s photographed.

Think embedding a watermark or circle-C into your pictures will prevent them from being stolen? Burch stopped doing that because it wasn’t even a speed bump to the thieves. “All they do is convert the JPEG to TIFF, then back to JPEG — it removes the encrypted digitial watermark,” he explains.

Lara Jade Coton, a British teenager, had her innocent-looking self-portrait stolen off the deviantART website and slapped onto an X-rated DVD by a porn dealer in Houston, TX. She had a prominent copyright symbol imbedded on the image.

The porn movie’s owner and distributor, Bob Burge, insists that there was no such symbol on the picture when his designer downloaded it from a deviantART gallery. “And I can show you 30 other websites where that picture’s posted,” he told us.

Coton’s copyright wasn’t registered in the U.S., and her face is obscured so you can’t identify her. Still, she found an attorney in Florida to file suit in federal court for copyright infringement, civil conspiracy, misappropriation of her image, invasion of privacy, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. The case was pending at press time.

Take away a creator’s ability to prosper from his works, and you take away an incentive to create. That’s where copyright comes in. Its purpose: to encourage creativity by protecting property.

For more than 100 years, the U.S. Copyright Office, part of the Library of Congress, has been processing every copyright application (30 million claims, and counting) by hand. It now gets about 600,000 applications each year for everything from software to cereal-box copy. And its procedures have been in need of an update for quite a while.

A bill to modernize copyright law has been struggling through Congress for years, hung up on provisions governing “orphan works” — photos thought to be abandoned to the public domain. Photographers are pushing for tougher requirements for “due diligence” in seeking the owner of a photo, and for the Copyright Office to create a searchable database of copyrighted photos using image-recognition software.

Under the current registration system, you log onto the Copyright Office website, download the right form, fill it out (not always simple), either print or load your photos on a CD, and mail the whole shebang to Washington, D.C. There, your envelope gets irradiated to kill anthrax, slowing down its delivery by days. Then it’s hand-sorted and routed to an office where overburdened clerks separate valid claims from those they must help applicants straighten out.

Want to help reshape the process? The Copyright Office is developing an online registration program, eCO (Electronic Copyright), now in the beta testing phase. Some 400 testers a week are signing up to try eCO and to advocate making pictures searchable. To join them, go to copyright.gov.

I did it. “Your new user account with the electronic Copyright Office (eCO) has been activated.” I was thrilled to get this e-mail, as I’d already created a folder with 50 digital images to register.

The process: Fill out a series of application screens, pay the registration fee ($35, a $10 online discount), and upload your photos. You can place an unlimited number of images in a group filing for the same price. But beware: Sending 5,000 photos means breaking them up into many transmissions, requiring a 19th-century level of patience.

I ran into some tiny bugs, but the system only launched in June 2007. By the end of November, it had handled more than 18,000 filings, 3,283 by photographers. Almost all the photos came in groups of up to several hundred images each.

The application screens are easy — until you’re asked if the pictures have ever been published. The government’s definition of “published” was adopted in 1976. If you’ve posted pictures on a website in order to sell them, they’re considered published, but if you’ve posted them without the obvious intent to sell, it’s a gray area. (You can find out more in Circular 66 at copyright.gov/circs/circ66.html.)

The most awkward part of the process comes when eCO transfers you to the Treasury Department site to pay with a credit card or set up an account. I thought I’d hit a glitch: It kept asking for a “deposit,” which to me meant money. The folks at the beta tester helpline told me that “deposit” is copyright lingo: It was time to send in my creations.

The pictures needed to be in a ZIP folder. Two clicks on the desktop — done. A few more clicks on the eCO website, and my masterpieces took cybernetic wing. At 11:01 a.m. the site started uploading about 70 megabytes, at a transfer rate of 40KB per second. “Transfer Complete” flashed on my screen at 11:32. It was embarrassingly easy.

The application is now being processed electronically, and I should be getting my registration certificate in the mail much sooner than the five months it takes when you send in old-fashioned CDs for processing.

Marybeth Peters, director of the U.S. Copyright Office, says she was forced to use off-the-shelf software for this system when the office began modernizing six years ago. “It’s a useable model we’re very proud of and we’re happy to have it,” she says. “But it’s not a Cadillac. It’s more like having a reliable Ford that you can improve and keeps chugging along.”

Peters encourages photographers to try the system and offer feedback. But image recognition is still “years away,” she says. “We’re hoping a private consortium assembles a searchable database. It’s not in our three-year strategic plan to have image-recognition technology become part of the system. We have the official records of ownership and should be the place you end a search, not the place you start one.”

But so far, efforts to start a private photographic collecting society (like the music industry’s ASCAP or BMI) have come to naught. Victor Perlman of the ASMP believes that should be the Copyright Office’s job. “It’s a government agency — it’s supposed to serve the public, and if the public wants to find the owner of an orphan work, it’s up to the Copyright Office to offer that capability,” he says. “The only way to verify is to actually see that image, and that’s what they’re not letting you do.”

Still wondering if registering your copyright is worth the effort?

There’s no telling how much Kelly Fajack could have received if he’d registered his photo of schoolchildren in Burundi working at their desks in 2002. It was a tricky capture, on Kodak Ektachrome E100S film with his Contax G2, backlit with dark faces. And it was beautifully composed — which is why it ended up on the 10,000 franc note (about $10) in Burundi’s paper currency. An American diplomat tipped him off.

Last spring Fajack settled with the British printing behemoth De la Rue, which makes currency for about half the world’s nations, for a sum he can’t divulge. But it wasn’t anything near the $150,000 he could have asked for in court, had he registered his copyright. “The vast majority thinks everything is free for the taking on the internet,” says Fajack, who has found eight other websites using his pictures without permission.

His reaction to having one of his shots immortalized on paper money is mixed. “I’m happy to have my own little piece of African history. I settled and I’m okay with it,” he says. “But theft is so common on the web now, and photographers are getting the short end of the straw.”

Free Photos?

What’s between royalty-free and all rights reserved? Creative Commons.

A brainchild of Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig, it’s grown from a bright idea — how can I share my copyrighted picture/software/book for free? — to a global cultural movement.

Creative Commons (creativecommons.org) was inspired in part by the music industry’s aggressive attacks on free music downloading and swapping. And there are libertarian technophiles who think computer operating software should be free. Lessig came up with the idea of this middle ground where creators could use each other’s work without the choking cloud of commercialism.

Under Creative Commons, licenses (there are several types) reserve limited rights, such as requiring only that you be credited for the work or that the copyright expire 14 years after you do (compared with 70 years in current law). You can even assign your work to the public domain for anybody to use without attribution, in whole or in part.

Think about it. You’re not a pro — you just love taking photographs. Maybe you’d like to discover one on some fancy travel website, or flashing on a billboard, or even on the back of some landlocked country’s $2 bill?

Pros hate the idea because a larger pool of royalty-free pictures cuts into their bottom line.

But if you think the world will be better off by emancipating your photographic offspring, it’s your own bottom line that matters.

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Three-year-old Sarah M. is either a toddler in her birthday suit playing in the garden, or a nude temptress with a sultry look who requires protection from the culprits who took this photograph — her doting parents.

This is the fix we’re in, now that computers have opened the barn door on kiddie porn. The FBI has issued blanket requests to photo processing labs and computer repair shops in some cities to be on the lookout for pictures of kids in compromising positions, urging them to call the authorities whether they’re sure or not about a picture’s legality. The big national chains that have photo processing labs — Costco, CVS, Rite-Aid, and Wal-Mart — have company policies that compel them to notify the police about any criminal activity they see in customers’ photos. And when children are involved, they’re more than willing to err on the side of caution.

“You can’t have a blanket set of guidelines because pictures are subject to interpretation based on community standards,” says Mike DeAngelis, a spokesman for CVS Pharmacy, with about 5,400 outlets nationwide. “But the store managers know it’s up to law enforcement to decide what’s criminal.”

Tragically for a number of people all over the country, innocent family photos turned over to the police have led to financial ruin, divorce, debt, public humiliation, and lifelong scorn as a registered sex offender for mothers and fathers.

Some cases involved pictures much less provocative than Sarah M.’s. Based on the way prosecutors interpreted photos in a few of those cases — Marian Rubin, a New Jersey grandmother charged for taking nude photos of her granddaughters, then aged 3 and 8; and Jeffrey B., a New York father who lost custody of his two daughters after he shot pictures of them mooning him — it’s possible to spot red flags where our innocence used to be.

Here’s how a zealous prosecutor could view Sarah M.’s picture: Smoldering eyes; styled, tousled blond tresses; pouty, parted lips; splayed legs; an engorged navel. And that viscous liquid dripping from the wand onto her thigh? Money shot.

|| |—| | For more see: Your Photos Could Ruin Your Life (Part 2) on the PopPhoto Flash blog. | A blurry line

Just because they didn’t shoot the picture for the purpose of sexual stimulation doesn’t mean parents who just want to document their child’s garden years can’t get stuck in the sordid world of pedophilia.

Since there have been documented instances where photo lab employees have kept copies of sexually explicit pictures that were dropped off for development or printing, including from digital sources, imaginative authorities believe that it’s possible for child pornography to be inadvertently made and unknowingly distributed. (Adult porn isn’t illegal unless it’s found to be obscene.)

This has led to a more proactive, better-safe-than-sorry approach to snooping into people’s photo archives, which gives civil libertarians the jitters.

The claim has been made that we all have to view innocent photos through the eyes of a pedophile, for the good of the children. But, attorney Andrew McCullough argued before the Utah Supreme Court in a case involving allegedly arousing pictures of underage children, “lots of things are innocent enough and can be misused, but you can’t be responsible for everybody’s thoughts.”

And in Honolulu, after the local FBI office started contacting computer repair shops about what they should be on the lookout for inside customers’ computers, the ACLU Hawaii’s executive director, Vanessa Chong, was quoted as saying that the G-men’s fishing expedition “needlessly violates the privacy rights of honest consumers to find the guilty few.”

The question of whether you surrender privacy rights when you hand over a computer full of personal information to a repair shop is still open. Cops say they’re sensitive to these issues. Photo labs and computer repair shops “haven’t sent us anything that wasn’t clearly child pornography, or could reasonably be suspected,” remarks Lt. C.L. Williams, in charge of the Crimes Against Children unit of the Dallas, TX, police department.

Lt. Williams acknowledges that there’s a gray area when it comes to interpreting photos of children, and often the kids are taking pictures of each other without their parents’ knowledge. His unit frequently determines that pictures referred to them are innocent artistic or family photos, “but there’s very little artistic value in a crotch shot of a 6-year-old girl.” He says his investigators are now seeing pictures of penetration on 2-year-olds.

“We’re not trying to pry into people’s lives,” he says. “I wouldn’t want the government sticking its nose into my photography, and I don’t want to be the one doing it to someone else. But when a picture crosses the line into child abuse, then it’s my business.”

In May 2006 in Lackawana, NY, the FBI arrested William D. Baker, 63, for possession of child pornography after getting a tip from a computer repair technician. (His case was still pending as we went to press.) Technicians finding questionable material also have led to arrests in Seattle, WA; Collier County, FL; and Odessa, TX.

It isn’t just porn. Also in May 2006, an east Georgia man was arrested when he went to pick up pictures of his marijuana crop at a drugstore photo counter. And the snooping doesn’t have to involve anything obviously illegal: In October 2005, a student in North Carolina got a visit from the Secret Service at his high school after the Kitty Hawk Wal-Mart photo lab called the police. As a classroom civics assignment to photographically illustrate the Bill of Rights, he’d cut out a magazine photo of President George W. Bush, tacked it to a wall with a red thumbtack through the head, made a thumb’s down sign next to it, and snapped a picture. Lesson learned.

Images of children, though, have the power to stir passionate forces. And the smallest photographic detail can send the shooter into a waking nightmare.

Jeffrey B. (he requested his last name not be printed to protect his daughters) was divorced and had custody of his two girls, then aged 4 and 7, until a Genovese drugstore photo lab in the New York City borough of Queens inserted a note into a packet of his prints that said several shots had been turned over to police. Seven years later — after four weekends in jail, three years on probation, mandated therapy, losing custody of his daughters, contemplating suicide, and incurring about $300,000 in lawyer’s fees and loss of income — he’s a registered sex offender and has no contact with his children.

He declined an interview, but the lawyer who handled his appeal, Joseph Klempner, who also wrote Irreparable Damage, a novel based on the case, says Jeffrey B. is “destroyed,” and has not taken a single picture in seven years. “I’d stake my life on the fact that all he was doing was taking cute photos of his kids,” says Klempner, who saw the offending pictures.

According to Klempner, the prosecutor said she found the silk sheets on the bed where the 7-year-old’s picture was taken “very telling.” The girl had mooned her father, and he snapped a picture from across the room. “It would take the Hubble Telescope” to see her unmentionables, relates Klempner.

In the other offending photo, the girls are shot from below, sans bathing suit bottoms, as they pretend to read books. A crucial fact in Jeffrey’s conviction: One girl testified that Daddy posed them.

‘Granny Busted’

In early 2000, Marian Rubin’s granddaughters, Amy, then 8, and Kayla, then 3, were dancing naked on her bed before bath time, strutting their best Britney and Christina moves. In still photos, they must have looked posed.

Rubin is the basis of an urban legend, the 65-year-old granny taken to jail for snapping innocent bathtub pictures of her beloved grandkids. Except her case was real, and the headlines in the Trentonian screamed, “Granny Busted/Cops Think She’s a Perv.”

The night that she was arrested, after picking up the nude pictures of the girls at a local MotoPhoto outlet — Rubin, an experienced and award-winning art and children’s photographer, insists that she never intended to publish these photos — Montclair, NJ, police went to the girls’ home and had their parents wake them up.

“They asked totally inappropriate questions,” says Rubin, who is now 72. “‘Did Granny get undressed, too? Did Granny touch you? Did Granny touch herself?’ They threatened my son and daughter that, if they didn’t cooperate, the kids would be taken away.”

Rubin wrote a book, Naked Truths (www.naked-truths.com), detailing her outrage at what she calls vigilante film processors, and she excoriates cops and prosecutors for being unable to admit they’d made a mistake.

On her lawyer’s advice, she took a deal called a “Pretrial Intervention” that amounted to conditional probation but left her with no criminal record. She now regrets not taking the case to trial. Even though a federal judge later found the pictures to be “totally inoffensive,” Rubin is still paying off the $30,000 debt.

“I haven’t taken a nude picture since,” says Rubin, who has won awards for nude bodyscape photography. “Portraiture was my thing. They took away my innocence, constricted my vision, brainwashed me into seeing things differently. They definitely changed my pictures of children.”

For more see Your Photos Could Ruin Your Life (Part 2) on the PopPhoto Flash blog.

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Howl, Allen Ginsberg’s ode to alienation, invokes “the visible mad man doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East.” A few of those madtowns — vast insane asylums in campus settings — are still standing, abandoned and rotting into exquisite ruin. And, in the same way that photographs of the empty wrecks speak more eloquently than if the buildings were new, Howl’s description of one of them is even more accurate now than it was when Ginsberg’s mother died there in 1956: “Greystone’s foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnite…”

Recent pictures of Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital capture that poetic vision. Founded in 1876 as the New Jersey State Lunatic asylum, north of Morristown, this is where folk music pioneer Woody Guthrie spent five years, 1956 to 1961, as he was ravaged by Huntington’s disease. He was visited on Ward 40 by an awestruck Bob Dylan, who later wrote up the encounter in “Song For Woody.” Wardy Forty, as Guthrie called it, was a synapse in modern musical history that has been moldering away and off-limits since the mid-1970s.

That hidden dilapidation is exactly what interested photographer Phillip Buehler. His photographs of the disintegrating landmark will be published in a book, Wardy Forty: Woody Guthrie at Greystone Park (University of Illinois Press).

Guthrie, bickering with the echoes of his own soul, was committed to Greystone because of a misdiagnosis. He was photographed the day he arrived in 1956 and the day he left, in 1961. In 2002, those two pictures were still in the basement files, along with about 50,000 other negatives, when Buehler and a friend, having approached stealthily through the woods on bicycles, evaded security (there’s a police station across the street) and entered the imposing, Neo-Gothic, gray granite edifice.

Buehler had his Mamiya 7 with a 43mm lens and Provia film — check. Cell phone on vibrate — check. First aid kit — check. Rope in case someone falls through a floor — check.

Buehler has shot pictures in forbidden places all over the world, including an airplane graveyard near Tucson, AZ, a now-demolished Alcoa aluminum plant near Edgewater, NJ, and rotting U-boat bunkers built by slave labor in the 1940s near Bremen, Germany. (You can see more of his work at www.modern-ruins.com.) He’s part of a growing movement in which photographers are becoming curators of a receding reality. There’s no denying the romance of wreck and ruin — and photography is a passageway and an excuse to wallow in it.

Abandoned chemical plants, timeworn miniature-golf courses, silent steel mills. The dilapidated city of Gary, IN. Nevada’s 1,375-square-mile nuclear testing grounds. Parched water parks, secret ghost towns, the decommissioned missile bunkers ringing most major cities. Pretty much everything in the built or altered environment is being photographed for posterity, with or without official permission.

Most of us have done this inadvertently. Whatever it was that drew me to the paddle wheeler graveyard up in the Yukon, or the jungle-choked secret army base now manned by monkeys on an island in the middle of the Panama Canal, is the same thing that pulls us all toward a place we’re not supposed to be, a zone with no rules, off the cultural grid. People are competing in a form of one-downmanship, braving asbestos, PCBs, poison gas, radioactivity, killer mold, venomous spiders, rats, meth freaks — and, of course, cops and trespassing citations — to locate and capture in pictures the played-out dreams and flyblown empires retrogressing in civilization’s rearview mirror.

Digital technology is driving the craze. You can guile your way into an old rackabones building in the morning, shoot 40 images, upload them onto a website that evening, and read global commentary on them before midnight. Buehler calls himself a photographic historian, but others call themselves industrial archaeologists, urban explorers (“urbexers”), drainers, and cataphiles — those who like to slither underground into Parisian catacombs and L.A. storm drains. Almost all of them carry cameras.

In the abandoned darkroom downstairs at Greystone, Buehler shot the overflowing photo-file cabinets of long-gone patients, but didn’t touch a thing. “Once you have a photograph of it, you’ve rescued it in some way,” he explains.

He found out later that the Woody Guthrie Foundation and Archives were in Manhattan, and that led to the troubadour’s medical record numbers. Then Buehler snuck back into Greystone, used the numbers to locate Woody’s mugshots in the file drawers, and liberated them from oblivion. The 5×7-inch negatives are now part of the Guthrie archives.

Rescuing such sunken treasure is almost unheard of, though there are plenty of patient records, electroshock machines, and other artifacts still hidden in the festering remains of asylums. (The patient negatives and medical records at Greystone were hastily cleaned out by authorities after Buehler’s story appeared in the magazine Weird New Jersey.)

Still, East Coast urbexers are spoiled. The Kirkbride insane asylums, built in the late-1800s to the specifications of mental health pioneer Thomas Story Kirkbride, really were madtowns, with their own post offices, carpentry shops, and fire departments. The two dozen derelicts still standing, originally designed in grand styles by leading American architects, are spread all over the Northeast. Photographs inside these deteriorating structures, usually shot with available light, often evoke Howl’s “visible mad man doom,” and reach the level of art.

Ian Ference, a 25-year-old full-time urban explorer and photographer in New Jersey who hangs with a small cell of about 15 likeminded, even high-minded, fellow ruin-rooters, has gone as far as to use grappling hooks and knotted ropes to climb into second-floor windows. Sometimes he and his companions “predawn” a building so they can doze inside until the sun comes up. They rarely use flash, which tends to blast out the creepy texture of peeling paint and the end-of-the-world half-light oozing through tattered curtains.

Ference has made 30-minute exposures using his 30-year-old Minolta XD 11, loaded with Fujicolor Pro 160S. “My thing is institutional tubercular sanatoriums, psychiatric asylums, and prisons,” he says. “They have the most history, the most pathos. They’re part of our collective heritage that’s being lost.”

But I’m a West Coaster, and although there’s some decent devolution underway out here — haunted old theaters in Hollywood, abandoned shipyards in San Francisco Bay — this is no Rust Belt. Our ruins are less dramatic than a chemical plant or a desiccated amusement park.

Still, like every other American city, San Diego, where I live, has storm drains, all of them off-limits, most of them regularly explored by a small group of urban adventurers. So one Saturday morning I met Dan C. and Rob R. for an excursion into a 12-foot-diameter drain that extends from Balboa Park to the bay.

First aid kit — check. Headlamps — check. Nylon socks and running shoes so we can get our feet wet but dry out quickly — check. Deflated rubber rafts — check. Short-handled paddles — check. Raft pump — check. Heavy-duty lights for photography — check. Cajones — uh, well…

We skulked down behind a parking lot and crossed a busy street, three guys with curious loads rolled up and tied onto their daypacks. We passed through an unlocked gate, butt-slid down into a concrete culvert, and trudged about a quarter-mile until the channel disappeared into a 12-foot-wide steel gullet, which swallowed us into perfect darkness.

Once past the imbecilic graffiti tags near the entrance, we crept along the dry pipe under a major highway. Some decent graffiti art appeared in our headlamp beams, reminding me of the elaborate murals under Los Angeles a drainer had told me about. Cave art in the pitch blackness beneath our cities was a comforting thought. It distracted me from wondering if antiterror agents in black Ninja outfits were lurking somewhere, like the full-time catacomb patrol unit of the Paris police department.

We’d already passed beneath the downtown and had seen many small feeder drains leading up to grates in the gutters above us. Occasionally we encountered high-vaulted chambers with ladder rungs leading up to manhole covers, faint shafts of light shooting down through air holes in the iron discs. “‘When it rains, stay out of the drains’ is one of our mottos,” Dan explained helpfully. More darkness slipped behind us.

More than a mile in, we came to a split in the round pipe where it branched into two square concrete channels with a lower ceiling. I shined my dive light into the void, and there was a River Styx clogged with floating plastic jugs, cigarette butts, and a waterlogged mattress. It was time to grab the pump and become blackwater rafters. Our voices sent eerie echoes down the pipe in front of and behind us. Mine was the highest. I’d had enough. No subterranean rafting today. We shot a group photo and turned around.

In a Dry Country

4 WD drive vehicle — check. Desert camping gear — check. GPS unit with topo map programs — check. Canon EOS 30D with tripod — check. Six-gun — check.

Lewis Shorb has to be able to shoot more than pictures when he hikes into the high deserts of California and Nevada, looking for ghost towns. “You’ve got to assume everybody you encounter is armed,” he explains. “And we’re running across more meth labs set up in old mine shafts.”

Shorb, 48, is a serious photographer devoted to chronicling humanity’s footprints in godforsaken places (see his work at www.ghosttownexplorers.org). He’s not interested in touristy ghost town parks like Bodie or Calico. “Anywhere near a road, there’s not much left,” he says. “Old cabins become firewood. Treasure hunters are how ghost towns disappear.”

Shorb and his small clan of historians and desert rats pore over out-of-print government mining reports for clues to the locations of especially productive mines, which would have had sizeable settlements nearby. When he bushwhacks into a remote area and hits pay dirt, “sometimes it’s hard to believe how many people lived out there in the middle of nowhere. You’ll see the remains of what were beautiful brick structures, all gone.”

Some of these tough old towns are still on working claims, most guarded by a caretaker. “It’s usually a crusty guy with a gun, but that’s part of the fun, those characters,” says Shorb. “At the Blue Jasmine Mine in the Western Sierra, a couple of hours from Nevada City, there’s a caretaker who hasn’t left the property in three years. He looks like the Hobbit, bald on top with long gray hair around the sides. Lives on the Yuba River, generates his own electricity with a little water wheel connected to a Ford alternator. He has a satellite hookup to the internet and sells gold nuggets on eBay.”

Shorb says if you’re nice, and interested in history, and maybe bring along an extra case of beer, most caretakers will allow you in to see the old mining equipment or wander the bleached clapboard buildings. But it isn’t for the ill-equipped. When I told him I was going down in the storm drains, he asked, “You taking an O2 analyzer?” He cautions that exploring mine shafts and other tunnels is inherently dangerous, and that two men died in Nevada a couple of years ago from poison gas just 75 feet into a mine shaft. “You want a breathing mine, one you can feel cool air blasting from. That means the miners cut a ventilation shaft.”

The desert mummifies everything into jerky, so Shorb’s pictures have more of a frozen-in-time feel than images of the asylums or other structures more actively rotting back east. But they offer the same message: Only in retrospect does the true nature of existence become clear, when the fragility of all living things, animate and inanimate, is revealed.

Steal This View

This hit me at an inopportune moment above hazy San Francisco Bay, as I was gripping welded-steel rungs and climbing up through a man-cage toward the working end of a towering dockside crane.

The rust-pocked behemoth was left to the gulls and the corroding sea along the quay of Mare Island Naval Shipyard when the base closed in 1996. Jef Poskanzer, a Berkeley-based urban explorer and “industrial archaeologist” who was climbing up behind me, had wanted to document the base for his website on the Bay Area, www.jef.poskanzer.org.

We’d already inspected the base hospital, with its 1919 sundial still keeping time and a dried-up therapy garden with sweet purple grapes hanging heavy from a spindly arbor. But up on the crane, stepping lightly on rusty steel decking, the tannic aftertaste of the grapes was replaced by the metallic tang of fear.

“At least it isn’t windy,” Poskanzer chuckled as he brushed past me in the trashed winch room, climbed some more rungs into the glass-enclosed operator’s booth, and started aiming his Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ10 with a 35-420mm (equivalent) Leica DC Vario-Elmarit lens.

Below us spread an end-of-the-world diorama. Three immense dry docks, piles of rusting steel ship innards, a dead forest of reeking pier pilings, gutted cranes lined up like exoskeletal dinosaurs. The hulking black sail and diving planes of a nuclear submarine was silhouetted in the luminous mist. We spied the rip in a chain-link fence we’d need to crawl through to reach all these goodies, and descended into the heap.

In person, the view seemed historical, a peek at time’s back lot, but in the pictures uploaded later that day, the scene was transformed by the camera into a vision of the postindustrial future.

If you enter a structure that’s abandoned, not fenced, and not posted with “No Trespassing” signs, you generally can’t be issued a trespassing citation. But, “all the best places are the hardest to get into,” says Ian Ference, an aficionado of fenced-off asylums.

And trespassing is not to be taken lightly. Get caught with the wrong tools in the wrong place by the wrong guy, and you can end up doing real time. What you might think is a misdemeanor might actually be felony breaking and entering. “The possibility of getting caught is part of the attraction,” says Jeremy Harris, a West Coast-based explorer, “but it’s also an annoyance.”

Or worse. Consider the explorer chased down last fall by men in tan outfits on the grounds of a Church of Scientology bunker complex near San Bernardino, CA. This is an “active” site — at least partly occupied. They called the police, and “Joe Earthworm” (he requested anonymity) was arrested for trespassing. “I intend to fight it — they’re crazy. The property was not clearly marked,” he says.

In fact, a lack of signage won’t always shield you. In some states, like Colorado, you can be convicted of trespassing even if there are no warnings. In most states, it won’t help if you’re caught with weapons or tools that could pick locks or jimmy deadbolts. That boosts the charge to a fourth-degree felony in New Jersey, with jail time of up to 18 months.

Your best protection? A camera. “My camera is a get-out-of-jail-free card,” says Phillip Buehler, who rowed a boat out to dilapidated Ellis Island when he was 17 to take pictures — illegal, of course. Now he’s 49, and some of those photos are in Ellis Island’s archives, as is his account of exploring the human gateway 30 years ago.

When Buehler is confronted by security guards or police, he becomes “all respect, first and foremost.” He uses his camera to show he’s no vandal, and tells them he’s trying to preserve these places before they disappear. If that doesn’t work, he suggests groveling.

Security cameras, motion sensors, proximity alarms — all in a day’s shooting for hardcore photo explorers. Then there are the tommy guns. At Nevada’s Nuclear Test Site, north of Las Vegas, “There are guys driving around with machine guns,” warns Peter Kuran, a filmmaker who has shot as well as sleuthed from government archives hundreds of photos related to nuclear-bomb tests. “You wouldn’t want to trespass out there.”

Other ways determined explorers get the shot without getting into trouble:
• After approaching a site on bicycles, they pull the bikes inside behind them.
• If they remove screws to free a board to get inside, they pull the board up behind them and screw it back in when they leave.
• In the desert or backcountry, they always chat up the caretaker about the history of the place, offer refreshment, and politely ask for permission to enter private property.
• In case they get caught, they make sure they’ve brought along proper identification. “I’d rather carry ID and get a citation than not carry it and get arrested,” says California cataphile Dan C.
• And for that golden moment between the security guards’ call and the cops’ arrival? They wear good running shoes.

Additional Resources

Books

Access All Areas: A User’s Guide to the Art of Urban Exploration, by Ninjalicious; Infilpress (2005)
Dangerous Places: Health, Safety, and Archeology, edited by David A. Poirier and Kenneth L. Feder; Bergin & Garvey Paperback (2001)
Dead Tech. A Guide to the Archaeology of Tomorrow, by Manfred Hamm; Hennessey & Ingalls (2000) [out of print]
Ellis Island: Ghosts of Freedom, by Stephen Wilkes; W. W. Norton (2006)
Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality, by Tim Edensor; Berg Publishers (2005)
Invisible Frontier: Exploring the Tunnels, Ruins, and Rooftops of Hidden New York, by L.B. Deyo and David Leibowitz; Three Rivers Press (2003)
Invisible New York: The Hidden Infrastructure of the City (Creating the North American Landscape, by Stanley Greenberg; The Johns Hopkins University Press (1998)
New York Underground: The Anantomy of a City, by Julia Solis; Routledge (2004)
New York’s Forgotten Substations: The Power Behind the Subway, by Christopher Payne; Chronicle Books (2002)
Underworld: Sites of Concealment, by Manfred Sach and Klaus Kemp, photographs by Peter Seidel; Hennessey & Ingalls (1997)

DVDs

Atomic Journeys, Welcome to Ground Zero, directed by Peter Kuran (Goldhil Home Media, 2000)
Echoes of Forgotten Places: Urban Exploration, Industrial Archaeology and the Aesthetics of Decay, directed by Robert Fantinatto; Scribble Media (2005)

Websites

gallery.pimprob.com/UE091006
www.clui.org/clui_4_1/shop/select.html [Center for Land Use Interpretation books list]
www.darkpassage.com
www.infiltration.org
www.jef.poskanzer.org/photos/archaeology.html [lots of links to other urban exploration sites]
www.modern-ruins.com
www.opacity.us
www.uer.ca

The post Adventures in The Forbidden Zone appeared first on Popular Photography.

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“Basically, everybody who can take pictures, does. This is something really, really deep,” says Dimitrios Deliz, a leading photo industry analyst. “Why did digital photography take off so fast? Why does 80 percent of the population take pictures? It must be something close to our being.”

Those beings number 240 million and counting (80 percent of 300 million), in the U.S. alone.

But why? Photography has been the country’s number-one pastime for about 100 years, so there shouldn’t be much of a mystery about our reasons for snapping away. Marketing surveys show kids, pets, and trips are still the main subjects. And although photography is often seen as a particularly male hobby, women make up the majority of people who buy point-and-shoot cameras, as they have since Kodak introduced its 100-shot, preloaded box camera in 1888.

But people take pictures for purposes beyond saving memories and sharing experiences. In a 2006 survey by the Photo Marketing Association, 62 percent of camera users said they took pictures “for pure enjoyment,” while 50 percent “just like to.” Some 13 percent want most “to master the skill involved,” and 11 percent do it for “artistic expression.”

What is it about photography that enables more than 26 million people to declare themselves artists? What’s going on behind the viewfinder?

The Freudians spotted something early in the photography craze because they kept hearing about cameras from the psychoanalyst’s couch. This set off speculation into the deeper impetus, unconscious motivations, and hidden meanings of taking pictures. You can mark the very date when shrinks first tried to enter the darkrooms of the soul: On November 5, 1924, at a meeting of the British Psychoanalytic Society, two papers were presented: “Photography as a Pseudo-perversion” and “Camera as a Phallic Symbol.”

Bristle though you may, there might be something to this. Think of the spectrum of photophiliacs: the gear-hoarding obsessive, the narcissistic self-portraitist, the fetishist who only shoots pictures of red things, the self-kidders behind all those flashes in the stadium’s upper deck when something momentous happens down on the field. Don’t you just want to RATTLE THEIR MIDGET BRAINS RIGHT OUT OF THEIR SKULLS?!!

Of course you don’t, because the Freudians were wrong, and you’re not an aggressive pseudo-pervert. Right?

My Pictures, Myself

At about the same time Sigmund’s minions took us on, photography was dividing into the three main subgroups that marketers still recognize today: the pros, the consumers (95 percent of the camera market), and the enthusiasts — the early adopters who always go for the latest gadgets, and the aesthetes who’ve pushed photography into the realm of fine art.

But consumers and enthusiasts seem to share a common motivation. “My perception is that when pictures are being taken, it’s a prolonging of the moment, a justification for our being,” explains Deliz, the director of research for the PMA. “We don’t want something to end. Showing the pictures is a way of extending the experience.”

As for the finding that preserving memories is the driving force of photography, he says, “It’s kind of weird. We wake up and do things every day to avoid thinking about our own death. But to preserve memories to me doesn’t make sense, because the pictures show your progression toward death. The positive motivation is more dominant — the camera can be with you anywhere to capture the excitement and keep it with you, until the next death-avoiding activity.”

Psychologist Greg Feist has a similar view. “There’s a fascination for capturing lost time,” he says. “People may be congenitally sentimental. What drives us is the need to capture that fleeting but eternal moment.”

Feist, a professor at the University of California, Davis, and the head of the American Psychological Association’s Society for the Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts, is also an avid landscape photographer who built his own darkroom. He sees several distinct psychological traits among the photo-enthusiast tribe: Buying the latest gear can become a compulsion, and getting the picture just so appeals to the perfectionist. And photos cater to the subconscious longing for meaning.

“Photography does appeal to the kind of person who is trying to capture life,” says Feist. “It’s a way to hang on, to be connected. It can show change and stability of personality over time. There’s something about the camera that we like to think is objective, but we all know it’s subjective. What we leave out, what’s implied in the image, is the true content.”

He notes that photography connects us to a primitive, primal self, a vestige of the lost epochs when we communicated through pictographs instead of language. “Freudian analysis is somewhat passŽ, but Freud was clearly onto something with his theory that these unconscious, preverbal kinds of thought pictures, like in dreams, are who we are, basically.”

Fun with Freud

A 1955 paper published in the journal Psychoanalysis, by the Freudian analyst Carl Fulton Sulzberger, wields a sharp scalpel — or is it a scimitar? — to lay bare our hidden urges. Titled “Unconscious Motivations of the Amateur Photographer,” Sulzberger’s article rains down painful truths like brimstone. To wit:
“Thus photography starts out as a voyeuristic thrill and ends as an act of exhibitionism.”

Then: ” … The hunting and shooting of the subject suggest the aggressive and sadistic pleasures of the chase, faint though they may appear in consciousness.”
And don’t forget: “The close relationship between photography and peeking is clearly demonstrated … “

He uses a patient’s dreams and association of thoughts to “reveal the camera as a symbol of an organ of reproduction.”

Sulzberger asserts that photo equipment holds a “meta-psychological fascination” for men. “The intricately fashioned, glittering tubes and shining lenses hold for them something of the appeal that jewelry does for women.”

The paper concludes that while most of photography’s gratifications are functions of the ego, the act of taking pictures is also id-driven, allowing satisfaction of the basic urges to see (voyeurism) and to show (exhibitionism) “in a socially acceptable manner.”

Modern shrinks have a more nuanced view of the photographic mindset. Dean Simonton, a UC Davis psychology professor who has published widely on the cognitive functions of creative artists and scientists, remembers his father converting a bathroom into a darkroom; now his daughter is an avid photographer who posts pictures on the web.

“The common denominator between my dad and daughter?” he asks rhetorically. “An opportunity to be creative, a chance to capture a special image to share with others, a means of becoming more aware of the world that surrounds us all? Some combination or interaction of these? Your guess is as good as mine.”

William Reid, a forensic psychiatrist and professor at the University of Texas, is a committed photographer. “Lots of psychiatrists,” he wrote in an e-mail, “often ones who take their work too seriously, would cite a wish by technical people to become artistic, wishing fervently for a larger right-brain. Or a wish to capture and control the things we see, to hold the beauty or the moment forever. Or on Freudian things like voyeurism (yes, I’ve done my share of nudes, too).”

Reid said he was amazed by “the panoply of lenses, camera bodies, filters, shades, flashes, tripods, et cetera” that some photographers carry. He attributes this not to the need to display bling, but to a longing for a sense of control, “being prepared for any photographic eventuality, or looking as we think professionals appear.”

Psycho-who?

There hasn’t been a scientific study of photographers’ motivations since the 1955 Sulzberger drive-by. But researchers now include photographers in the category of artists, and there have been plenty of studies into the nature of creativity.

Creative scientists and artists, including photographers, score high in tests on a personality trait called psychoticism. It’s a collection of attributes that put you about halfway to the nut house, with the potential to go completely ape. “Higher psychoticism scores were also reported among psychopaths and criminals,” reads one of many studies linking creativity and madness.

Cognitive scientists have established that highly creative people are about twice as likely to suffer a mental disorder as regular, boring people. But most creative types don’t go over the edge because (A) they’re not geniuses, so they’re exempt from the well-documented “price of greatness,” which links increased talent with increased psychoticism; and (B) tests show they also have traits that blunt the psychopathology, such as ego strength, openness, an ability to solve problems in a novel way, and higher-than-average intelligence.
“Accordingly, [creative individuals] can exert meta-cognitive control over their symptoms, taking advantage of bizarre thoughts, rather than having the bizarre thoughts take advantage of them,” wrote psychologist Dean Simonton in the June 2005 issue of Psychiatric Times, in a paper titled “Are Genius and Madness Related?”

For this article, I confined my own unscientific inquiry to internet forums. On Flickr.com, the online photo sharing site, about 30 people posted just more than 50 responses to a question about why they take pictures. Their thinking seems to confirm the mystical, irrepressible attraction photography holds for many people. (For the full Flickr discussion chains, check here and here.)

“I do get ego feeding out of exhibiting photos,” writes a union organizer in Portland, OR, who calls himself Old Sarge. “But I’d hardly call it exhibitionism. My job can be a giant ego-crushing activity and I could use an outlet from that … “

States Ulrich Schnell of Denmark, “I could characterize myself as an amateur photographer, but I am also a certified nutcase, so I am not entirely sure I fall within the boundaries of your study. There is the straightforward fact that I do it because I like it. On the other hand there is an explicit therapeutic goal, too … You could say I use it to keep my mind open to reality in a controllable manner.”

Garry Nixon, an Englishman, seems to confirm the psychologists’ view that snapping a picture is an attempt at sequestering eternity. “It’s a bit like planting trees to me,” he writes. “The buzz is that people might still be enjoying them when I’m long gone. As such, maybe it’s a stab at immortality?”
So perhaps market researcher Deliz is right: A grab for immortality entails an intense awareness of one’s own mortality. This sounds less like a pseudo-perversity and more like the human condition.

The responses on Flickr were so thoughtful and full of insight, they could have come from shrinks. Come to think of it, nearly every psychologist and psychiatrist contacted for this story turned out to be a photographer, too.

“Damn, thought you wouldn’t notice,” remarks William Reid, the forensic psychiatrist. “And given that the minds are similar, it is much cheaper to contact a photographer when one is feeling a little spacey.”

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Just before first light on a deserted street in Torrance, CA, Jim McKinniss faced a menace straight from a dystopian sci-fi story.

April 17, 2005
• 4:25 a.m. McKinniss, a 60-year-old retired software designer on assignment for a photography class, arrives and sets up his Canon EOS Elan with 100mm lens on a tripod on the public sidewalk, facing an ExxonMobil oil refinery.
• 4:40 a.m. A security car pulls up and parks behind him.
• 4:46 a.m. A Torrance prowl car zooms up the street.
• 4:47 a.m. The car returns, lights flashing, and parks behind the photographer. Another squad car jerks to a stop beside it. “Four cops walk up in a SWAT-type formation,” McKinniss later recalls. “They weren’t casual about it. Talk about intimidation!”
• 4:49 a.m. He is ordered to clasp his hands, thumbs down, behind his back. A cop grabs his thumbs with one hand and searches him with the other…

McKinniss has filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the city of Torrance, its police chief, and every officer present that night. The suit claims that when he was nabbed he was not a suspect in any crime, nor was there probable cause to trigger a search; it alleges violations of the First, Fourth, and 14th Amendments to the Constitution.

An assistant to the Torrance police chief says he cannot comment on pending litigation. But, he adds, “Obviously we have heightened concerns with certain locations within the city, due to the possibility of terrorism.”

The lawsuit is still open at press time, a settlement conference pending.

Like McKinniss, both amateur and professional photographers all over the country are being stopped and harassed with no legal basis. As digital cameras proliferate wildly, so do attempts to restrict what you can shoot and how you can use the picture. And not all attempts to quash photography have to do with national security concerns. Some invoke copyright and trademark protection, others the privacy both of celebrities and ordinary people.

But you can fight back. Knowing your rights and restrictions as a photographer is a good first step. When cases reach the point of legal proceedings, they’re usually settled in the photographer’s favor, according to lawyers who have represented photographers in court.

However, sometimes your own understanding of the law isn’t enough. According to his suit, when Jim McKinniss told the police officers that he was on public property and thought it was legal to photograph, “One of the officers asked if [I] had heard about September 11 and asserted that, since the terrorist attacks…it was illegal to photograph bridges, airports, and refineries.”

This is a crock. There’s no law in California or anywhere else in the U.S. that prohibits shooting such places from a public locale. You can even photograph inside airports, if you don’t point your camera at security checkpoints.

“These laws just don’t exist,” explains McKinniss’s attorney, Robert Myers, who took his case pro bono. “A law that attempts to prohibit photography from places open to the general public would be unconstitutional.”

Yet sworn police officers and rent-a-cops alike are routinely hounding people who are completely within their rights to take pictures in supposedly sensitive areas, as well as in a growing number of places unrelated to national security.

“This is just one of a number of examples across the country of law enforcement violating the constitutionally protected civil rights of photographers,” Myers declares.

McKinniss says the police made him sit cross-legged on the cold concrete and told him he had to wait until an intelligence officer arrived, according to the suit. They interrogated him, demanded his class syllabus, asked him if he was a terrorist, rummaged through his fanny pack without permission, shot several photographs of him, and inked his right thumbprint. They never touched his camera. After the 20-minute shakedown, they left. As he drove away, one cop said over the loudspeaker, chillingly, “Thanks, Jim.”

Now McKinniss wonders if his virtual mug shot, thumbprint, and personal information are in some counterterrorism database somewhere. (That’s not paranoia: New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority reportedly keeps such a secret database of the photographers who have been stopped and questioned by officers on the subways and around bridges.) His suit asks for damages and demands that all of the information the police collected that night, including photos and fingerprints, be deleted from law enforcement dossiers.

In a preliminary hearing on January 24, 2006, U.S. District Judge George King told McKinniss’s lawyer he would likely succeed on the legalities, called the cops’ behavior that night “disturbing,” and told Torrance’s attorney, “Maybe you folks need to better educate your officers.”

Robert Acciani, the Torrance deputy city attorney representing the city and police, says the officers deny most of the allegations. “Ten years ago [McKinniss] might not have gotten a second look, but after 9/11 that’s changed,” he says. “The officers were professional. They didn’t tell him what he was doing was illegal, and they didn’t tell him to get out of town.”

He claims that McKinniss may have gone to the refinery that night as part of a “set-up,” a suspicion based on “the [civil rights] attorneys representing him.”

Acciani explains that there is stepped-up scrutiny around the country. “This comes from the top, right from President Bush,” he says. “The Department of Homeland Security, as part of the war on terror, is begging for local law enforcement to be the backbone of this effort. Cops on the street are the ones to gather the intelligence. They have to keep their eyes and ears to the ground.”

And to the water. Photographer Jonathan Smith received a grant in 2004 from the Design Trust for Public Space to shoot all 14 major bridges to New York City. He’s been stopped and told many times by the police, incorrectly, that it’s illegal to photograph bridges. (Photographing on a bridge, a safety or traffic flow issue, is another story.)

Smith, a native of England, was ordered off Roosevelt Island, a heavily developed spit of land next to Manhattan, for shooting the Queensborough Bridge. He was even hauled to an MTA station next to the Throgs Neck Bridge in the Bronx. “When the officer stopped me, I said I was a tourist, and he asked, ‘Did you take a picture of the bridge? Come with me,'” Smith recalls.

On escalating tension between police and photographers, a New York City Police Department spokesperson explains, “We live in a world where everyone is suspicious of photography. Generally, anything in a public place can be photographed. But there’s a difference between taking a picture and taking surveillance, and our officers have to determine where that line is.”

The NYPD spokesperson adds that many such encounters are instigated by tips from the public.

Meanwhile, a lot of spin fills the void of photographers’ ignorance of their rights. It’s easy to understand why certain parts of Department of Defense facilities are off-limits, but that reasonable rule swelled into an unwritten photo ban on all federal buildings.

“This is one of the biggest myths with the law of taking photographs,” explains Bert Krages, a Portland, OR-based copyright attorney who has written books on photographers’ rights and techniques. “There is no general prohibition against photographing federal buildings. There are statutes that prohibit photographing areas of military and nuclear facilities. But there are no laws against photographing other federal facilities, other than the right of all property owners to restrict activities that take place on their property. A federal office building manager cannot restrict photography when the photographer is situated outside the federal property boundary.”

A wider boundary than you’d think. In fall 2005, Pop Photo Senior Editor Peter Kolonia was shooting small architectural details near the Mall in Washington, D.C. Stopping by the stairs of the Department of Agriculture to shoot the base of a column, with a fairly mainstream camera-a Fujifilm FinePix S3 Pro with a normal lens and no flash-he put one foot on the bottom step, and…

“Two people, a security guard in a generic uniform and a SWAT-type guy, dressed all in black with a big gun, came out the front and asked what I was doing.”

They looked at his pictures, then took the memory card and his driver’s license inside to run a check on him. “They were clearly trying to scare me,” he says. “They knew I was just a tourist. When they came out the second time they got very lecture-y with me: ‘Haven’t you heard there’s a war on? Do you know about the threat of terrorism?'”

They threatened to confiscate his camera (which requires a court order), and he had to talk them out of keeping his memory card.

How far does the zealotry extend? All the way to the flags at the county courthouse. That’s what recently got Ben Hider, a 27-year-old British citizen working (legally, with a green card) as a photographer, into trouble. On March 17, he stopped on a public thoroughfare at the Westchester County courthouse in White Plains, NY, to snap a few pictures of the wind-whipped flags out front.

Three court police officers quickly surrounded him and started firing questions, then told him he was being detained for shooting pictures of an official government building. He was taken inside, where he was frisked, interrogated, photographed, lectured on terrorism, told he was going to be picked up by the “terrorism task force,” and threatened with deportation. After being held for two hours, he was released.

“People should know that police are using fear and intimidation,” says Hider. “For what? I don’t know what they gain.”

He demanded an apology and got a tepid one from the court administration office. But the court security department wouldn’t apologize, saying that officers would do it again if necessary.

Private security guards seem to be taking cues from the stepped-up vigilance of the real police. They’ve been stopping people from photographing buildings, stadiums, and art works, claiming they’re copyrighted or trademarked, which often isn’t true.

Copyright laws contain a specific exemption for photographing buildings (only those built after 1990 can even be copyrighted). Nothing in copyright or trademark law prevents anyone from snapping a shot from a public place, even publishing it on a personal website, as long as they’re not cashing in on somebody else’s creation. The real issue is how that photo is used commercially.

Copyright automatically covers original works “fixed in a tangible medium of expression” from the moment of creation. But the copyright must be registered for maximum protection, with major damage awards possible if someone doesn’t pay to use the work commercially. A trademark, harder and more expensive to obtain, is “a word, name, symbol, or device, or any combination thereof,” used to distinguish particular goods from any other on the market.

You can find out if something’s been copyrighted or trademarked at www.copyright.gov or www.USPTO.gov.

Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum sued commercial photographer Charles Gentile for trademark violation after he sold posters of his photo of its trademarked building. In a landmark 1998 appellate ruling, one of the three judges on the Sixth Circuit panel wrote, “Not only may Gentile take a photograph of the building, he can sell a photograph of it. The Lanham Act only prevents him from ‘using in commerce’ his photograph of the trademark in such a way as to cause a ‘likelihood of confusion’ in the marketplace.”

Gentile won the case. Since then, says attorney Bert Krages, “these kinds of lawsuits have disappeared, although some entities still make threats.”

For instance, the so-called Lone Cypress Tree near California’s Pebble Beach Golf Course has supposedly been trademarked, and the previous owners of the property would threaten photographers and artists who might try to sell images of the 250-year-old tree. “To the best of my knowledge [the company] has never followed up on the threats because they have no legal basis,” Krages says.

However, photographers can be prevented from shooting the Lone Cypress, because every vantage point is on private property, and owners can set their own rules within the confines of their property. This is why managers of fast food joints freak when you pull out a camera to shoot the milkshake machines, and why the interiors of places such as shopping malls, casinos, and the New York Stock Exchange are no-photo zones.

Some pros shake off the extra scrutiny. “I tend to shoot first and ask questions later,” says Don Bartletti, a Los Angeles Times staffer who won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for feature photography. He’s been stopped from shooting in unexpected locations such as farm fields (proprietary growing techniques), grocery stores (proprietary shelving), and inside the Santa Ana Amtrak station (no particular reason). “The guy with the least amount of authority is going to be the most aggressive toward you,” he says, speaking from experience. “I always challenge when I know I’m in the right.”

It helps that Bartletti has a major news organization to back him up. For most, to call a guard’s bluff or walk away is a tough choice. Especially if an organization’s official policies-usually reasonable and lawful-differ from its practices on the ground. Is it worth the trouble to fight, even when you know you’re right?

When challenged, private security guards have threatened citizen’s arrest and police intervention.

That’s what happened to photographer Pablo Mason in early 2005 when stadium security guards stopped him from shooting a picture of the outside of Petco Park, the Padres’ baseball stadium in San Diego. Mason was walking around downtown, testing a Canon EOS-1Ds Mark II. He stopped in front of the new $474-million ballpark, which is 70 percent owned by the city.

He set up his tripod on the sidewalk and took a few pictures, when two stadium guards rushed out and told him he needed written permission to keep shooting. “They said Petco Park itself was copyrighted and the name was trademarked,” he reports. “One said, ‘You’re obviously a professional photographer, and you could use the picture commercially.’ We got into an argument and they threatened to call the police.”

Mason thought he was right, but the guards’ attitude made him doubt his knowledge. “The irony is that it’s the pros who are familiar with the copyright and trademark issues. I’m not going to infringe on somebody’s trademark, but an amateur might inadvertently.”

Another irony: Petco Park doesn’t show up in the online government database as copyrighted. “We don’t have a policy restricting photography at Petco [Park],” says Jeff Overton, executive vice president of communications for the Padres. “You can’t stop someone from taking a picture.” Whoever accosted Mason, he adds, must have been “an uninformed employee.”

Nor are there legal restrictions on photographing the name “Petco” on the building. “There is no trademark issue,” says Stan Little, general counsel of Petco Animal Supplies, Inc.

Another photographer intimidated into giving up his civil right to take a picture. Even though, says attorney Krages, “a security guard probably has no right to enforce somebody else’s copyright.”

Especially when the copyright in question doesn’t exist.

Even when you know you don’t need permission to shoot, it doesn’t hurt to make sure. Photographer Joel Meyerowitz, who has been documenting Ground Zero since 9/11, went so far as to get a permission letter from the police commissioner’s office authorizing him to shoot throughout New York City. He’s working on a city-sponsored photo project and wanted to avoid the inevitable hassle with police. “There’s a surveillance of infrastructure,” he says. “That I would need to get an authorization letter up front says a lot about how photography is viewed now.”

Interviews with professionals and amateurs who have been accosted while taking pictures reveal two approaches that may help you out. But first, make sure you’re right. There are many quick-reference guides to photographers’ rights on the web. Study the FAQs at www.copyright.gov and Bert Krages’ “The Photographer’s Right” at www.krages.com. Keep printouts in your camera bag.

Ounce-of-Prevention approach: You’re less noticeable without a tripod, but sometimes they’re necessary. Jonathan Smith, who has been stopped many times by police officers, says, “At night, I’ve wised up. I keep one eye out for the cop car at all times, and wait until he’s gone. Be as polite as possible, don’t challenge them, and shoot after they go away.”

Don’t-Tread-On-Me approach: If you’re the defiant type, keep your head, get the officers’ names, and, right afterward, write a strictly factual account of the events. You may need it if you go to court, and police claim you’re lying. Freelancer Steve Malik of San Francisco tried this approach in February 2005, when two fare inspectors confronted him for shooting at a San Francisco Municipal Railway station. In a letter demanding an apology, Malik wrote that they told him it was illegal to take pictures at underground stations since 9/11, and if he didn’t stop he’d be cited. After challenging what he viewed as an abuse of authority, he was asked for ID and taken into an office. When the police arrived, no one could find a law to cite him under, but he was detained for an hour. Officials sent him a written apology, which Malik posted online.

Possible Trouble Spots

From terrorism to trademarks, there are plenty of reasons why security may try to stop you.

Sears Tower. In late February, security saw three men get out of a car and start taking pictures of Chicago’s 110-story cloud-topper. The guards questioned the men and took down their license plate number. The car turned out to be rented under a false name, leading to an investigation by the Joint Terrorism Task Force, according to the Chicago Tribune . Now’s a bad time for photos.

New York subways. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s official policy does allow photography, despite a recent attempt to change the rules. But you’re still likely to draw unwanted attention from the public and the police if you break out a camera and start clicking away. Tripods are expressly forbidden.

The Flatiron Building. Photographers have been led to believe this beloved New York building is copy- righted. It isn’t. But the current owners are touchy about how pictures are used.

The Hollywood Sign. This is trademarked by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce. It donates a portion of licensing fees to the Hollywood Sign Trust, which maintains the huge landmark.

The “Lightning Field” artwork. Sculptor Walter De Maria’s gigantic grid of 400 polished steel poles on a high plateau three hours southwest of Albuquerque is strictly off-limits to photography. The work is copyrighted, but the photo restriction is only enforceable because the Dia Art Foundation owns the surrounding land, making it virtually impossible to see from a public place. Private property owners can set their own rules about on-site photography.

The san diego zoo. No, the animals aren’t copyrighted. But as at many venues, an entry ticket is considered a license. Printed in red on the back: “…visitor agrees not to commercially use any photography or reproduction in any form taken during any visits to the park.” Similar restrictions apply at Colonial Williamsburg, Sea World, Busch Gardens, and Hearst Castle.

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