Subway Photography Ban Protest This Sunday

R train pulls into Prince Street Station

This Sunday, amateur and professional photographers are expected to meet in midtown to protest the MTA's proposed ban on subway photography. Expect tons of coverage for Monday. And in the Village Voice, our friend Matt Haber asks different photographers (professional and photoblogger) how they feel about the ban as well as whether they've encountered problems taking pictures on the subway. Satan's Laundromat's Mike Epstein says:

The subway is the great meeting place of New York City. Almost everyone rides it. Taking pictures of my fellow New Yorkers should be just as legal on a train as it is on the street. And people who like to look at pictures of trains all day, well, maybe they're a little odd, but they're utterly harmless.

Yeah, but the MTA sometimes doesn't like it when you love the trains too much. Darius McCollum, a man with Asperger's, who loved trains, has impersonated as a conductor many times, been arrested many times, served jail time... learn more about his story in this Harper's story and at Boy Steals Train, a play based on him.

Gothamist on the subway photography ban.

Contact the author of this article or email tips@gothamist.com with further questions, comments or tips.

By Jen Chung in News on June 4, 2004 2:42 PM

Comments [rss]

David Mays

If you are a photographer, and get hassled by the police for exercising your rights, be sure to come write a story about it!

We're collecting all sorts of stories about police abuse of photographers' rights in one central place.

http://www.freedomtophotograph.com/

Agnostic_Fundamentalist

How absurd. How utterly absurd and impotent. At one time, I was of the belief that California led the nation in the number of left-of-center, intellectually lightweight, self-important politicos that seek the gratification of their egos by means of placing their mark, however insignificantly and ineffectually, in the penal code--at the expense of such trivialities as human freedom, human rights, human culture and the artistic expression thereof. New York, to my chagrin, has consistently proven me wrong. Her subways are as rich a mouthful of human essense as any to be found on the globe. But we will be denied the flavor of it for the self-aggrandizement of the small in our midst. The terrorist, in the meantime, will not be impeded, nor even inconvenienced.

Sarah

It seems that maybe there isn't too much to worry about with this - even if such a law is enacted, how on earth will they be able to enforce it?

990000

um, then will the terrorists have won?

- fotolog.net/0x99/?photo_id=534425

- fotolog.net/0x99/?photo_id=6263518

- fotolog.net/0x99/?photo_id=7613924

- fotolog.net/0x99/?photo_id=1139596

- fotolog.net/0x99/?photo_id=34879

- fotolog.net/0x99/?photo_id=34877

- fotolog.net/0x99/?photo_id=35837

unsupervised

This can only mean one thing: There must be plans to torture prisoners in the subways.

mike

I'm not protesting, I just happen to be taking pictures in the midst of a lot of other people taking pictures. ;)

Sorta like Critical Mass, er.... Critical Flash?

Dirk

Let's see hundreds (maybe) of photographers gathering in the subway, taking photos... Expect the cops to bust this up -- not because they're taking photos, but because they're protesting without a permit. Sounds like fun!