Coffee Is a Right (Senator Golden & The Freelancers) from Freelancers Union on Vimeo.

Have you ever been stiffed by a client? There isn’t a lot of recourse for freelancers beyond sending in invoice after invoice after invoice. A New York state law has now been proposed which would hold deadbeat clients responsible for money owed to freelancers. The Freelancer Payment Protection Act (S4129/A6698) aims to help out freelancers who haven’t paid.

The legislation is gaining traction: it’s passed through the New York State Assembly and has gotten support from both Democrat and Republican state legislators. If the act becomes a law, freelancers will be able to file complaints with the New York Department of Labor about clients who have not paid their bills and allow them to collect 100% of the fees owed to them in addition to legal fees and interest. It’s a small step, and would only apply to freelancers in New York, but it isn’t a small matter. According to the Freelancers Union, “in 2009, New York State’s self-employed lost $4.7 billion due to client nonpayment, and the state lost $323 million in tax revenue.”

You can help in a few ways. Sign your name in support of the Freelancer Payment Protection Act; if you’re in New York, contact your state legislators and tell them to support the Freelancer Payment Protection Act; if you’re anywhere else, contact your legislators and suggest a similar law.

Related required viewing: Fuck you, Pay me – a discussion of adventures in contracts, negotiation, and payment

(via the always hilarious Clients From Hell blog)

“While I’ve kept this story quiet for more than two years, it is my hope that by sharing it, my colleagues in the photography world will understand that you can fight for your rights and win. It’s not easy. But it can be done.”

-Dina Douglas, Douglass v. Fairey: How I Fought For – And Won – Credit From Shepard Fairey

Shepard Fairey, of Obey Giant and the Obama Hope poster fame, is now well known to steal the images on which he bases his artwork. In 2011, Fairey and the Associated Press reached a settlement in their legal battle over Fairey’s appropriation of Mannie Garcia‘s photo for the Obama Hope poster. Fairey now faces jail time in a related criminal case after pleading guilty to charges relating to document destruction and manufacturing evidence in the civil suit.

Now, photographer Dina Douglas has come forward with some details regarding her dispute, and eventual settlement, with Shepard Fairey over Fairey’s usage of her image of a cancer survivor. According to Douglas, Fairey contacted the photographer and they agreed to terms of usage for the painter to base an image on the photographer’s work. Fairey did not follow the terms of their agreement, which included an image credit for the photographer. The law was on the photographer’s side, and after months of legal back and forth, Douglas and Fairey reached a confidential settlement. The details of the settlement aren’t revealed, but Douglas now receives credit alongside Fairey’s artwork. You can read more details of the case at the photographers blog. If nothing else, this serves as another example that photographers can fight for their rights and win.

We wrote previously about Florida and Iowa lawmakers trying to make it illegal to record or photograph agricultural operations without the farm owner’s consent. Now, the Iowa bill has been signed into law, making it illegal to access farms without the owner’s consent and further making it illegal lie on farm job applications in order to gain access to farms. While the law no longer has language specifically addressing photography or video recording, both opponents and supporters of the law say that its intent is to prevent videos of farm operations from being made. Under the law, fraudulently entering a farm would be punishable by up to 1 year in prison and a $1,500 fine. Penalties increase for subsequent offenses. Activists have vowed to continue making videos of alleged animal cruelty, while supporters of the law say it strikes a balance in protecting farmers without preventing workers from reporting animal abuse through preexisting channels.

More states continue to press for similar laws. The Utah State House of Representatives recently passed Utah HB 187, which makes it a crime to record images or sounds of farm activity without the farm owner’s consent. Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, and New York, are also considering such legislation.

As before, if you live in any of these states, contact your legislators.

This first came to my attention during the holidays, and I’d hoped to have heard good news since then. Unfortunately, Kontinent photographer Johan Persson and writer Martin Schibbye remain in jail after being found guilty of supporting terrorism in Ethiopia in late December 2011. The two Swedish journalists had been investigating recent oil discoveries in the region for Filter magazine, their travel in the area having been arranged by the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) rebel group, which Ethiopia considers a terrorist organization. Ethiopian troops captured the pair in July as they traveled with the ONLF.

The Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt said in a statement on the Swedish government’s website that Sweden has made high-level contact with Ethiopia in the matter. Reinfeldt backs the notion that Persson and Schibbye were working as journalists and says the pair should be freed immediately. Meanwhile, the journalists remain in jail in Ethiopia and have decided not to appeal the verdict, opting instead to seek a pardon on the advice of experts in such matters.

Martinandjohan.org publishes updates on the case and provides details for ways to support the pair while they remain in prison.

We hope for speedy and safe freedom for both.

Well, I’ll admit to a mistake when I’m wrong. Thanks to Colin M. Lenton for writing in to let us know that AOL’s StudioNow looks ok for photographers. The contract for video work is a Work For Hire arrangement, but the photo contributor contract allows for 3 levels of rights transfer for photography: buyout, limited exclusive license, and non-exclusive license. Read the relevant bit here:

“For each engagement, StudioNow shall acquire: (a) ownership rights; (b) an exclusive license; or (c) a non-exclusive license to all work performed under the applicable engagement. The type of rights granted or assigned by Filmmaker shall be designated by StudioNow and such designation shall appear in the engagement packet or assignment as applicable.” -StudioNow photo contract, accessed on 16 December 2011

The standard wariness for approaching a job still applies. If the contract calls for a buyout, make sure you’re getting compensated for giving up your copyright. Fees should be quite high for such an arrangement, but copyright, like everything, can have a price. For limited exclusivity or non-exclusivity, fees should be less. Be aware of your copyright.

As it looks now, StudioNow might well be a good opportunity for photographers looking to get into corporate and advertising work.

Skip to about 1:45 in the video above to see police obstructing New York Times freelancer Robert Stolarik from taking pictures. It’s the latest demonstration of the NYPD’s general strategy of impeding the freedom of the press to cover Occupy Wall Street as it unfolds. We’ve written about states making it illegal to photograph or take video of police previously. But what we’ve seen in New York recently is a concerted effort to prevent the press from taking pictures or video of the protests and police conduct. Journalists have been arrested on a few occasions; here’s a personal account from Vanity Fair photographer Justin Bishop about his arrest. After the Stolarik incident above, which happened earlier this week, New York Times lawyer George Freeman sent a stern email to Deputy Police Commissioner Paul Brown, expressing the paper’s “disappointment” with the way Stolarik was treated. Here’s the full text of an earlier, similar letter, signed by a coalition of media honchos. In a discussion with Capital New York, Freeman described the email to the NYPD:

“We are disappointed that the result and first step of our recent meeting with Com. Kelly, the directive he issued reiterating that the police are not supposed to be interfering with the media’s doing their jobs and covering newsworthy events, has apparently not been followed or implemented on the ground. The World Financial Center video indisputably shows an officer bobbing and weaving for no other purpose than to block a Times freelancer’s ability to photograph police actions.” -NYT lawyer George Freeman, speaking with Capital New York

This isn’t the first volley between media and the NYPD and Bloomberg administration. Letters have been sent to the authorities before; various organizations have helped pressure the NYPD and other authorities, as well. Though this is not without some effect&em;in late November, NY Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly issued a memo for all police instructing them not to interfere with the media&em;the Stolarik video shows that police continue to obstruct the press with impunity.

The NYPD have also said that the best way for reporters to avoid arrest is to carry a press card issued by the NYPD (though later recanted that statement). Wired’s Threat Level blog dug into the process of getting a press card and found something straight from Orwell. “We aren’t issuing press credentials to reporters covering Occupy Wall Street,” Detective Gina Sarubbi, NYPD’s Deputy Commissioner of Public Information, told Wired. And NYPD spokesman Stu Loeser admitted that arresting credentialed journalists covering Occupy Wall Street was justified. Photographer CS Muncy says that wearing an NYPD press card is akin to wearing an “arrest me” sign at the Occupy demonstrations. The Village Voice has more general coverage of the issue.

The limitations placed on photographers are limited to Occupy Wall Street, New York City, or even the US. The Committee to Protect Journalists chronicles journalists killed and detained each year around the globe. Here’s the list of journalists killed so far in 2011.

The ACLU recently sued the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department in a federal suit, “alleging that the Sheriff’s Department and deputies ‘have repeatedly’ subjected photographers ‘to detention, search and interrogation simply because they took pictures’ from public streets of places such as Metro turnstiles, oil refineries or near a Long Beach courthouse.” American Journalism Review has further coverage of “the rising tension between news photographers and law enforcement officials” around the US.

And for a moment of levity, watch first half of the following Stephen Colbert clip in which is berates the Wisconsin state government for allowing guns in the state capitol building, but not cameras:

“Thank God! Cameras are dangerous. With no waiting period or background check any wack-job could just stroll into a Wal-Mart and walk out with a semi-automatic [camera]. Now for years I’ve been pressing for stricter regulations on cameras, especially around our elected officials. To many political lives have been cut short by some crazed [photo] shooter.” -Stephen Colbert on the Colbert Report

Colbert’s funny, but the issues are real. We’ve linked to Carlos Miller’s Photography is Not a Crime blog in the past, but it’s worth looking at again. Here are some recent posts: Virginia Man Arrested For Recording Cops Plans Lawsuit, Blogger Must Act Like Journalist To Be Treated Like One, Man Arrested After Photographing Executive Office Building In D.C., Nashville Police Arrest Journalist Covering Protest, Former WV Senator Ordered To Delete Photos In Pittsburgh Mall, Iowa Man Convicted In Videotaping Case Needs To File Appeal, Occupy Cincinnati Activist Arrested After Photographing “Covert” Cop Car, Occupy Calgary Activist Threatens To Sue Videographer For Recording Him, and Chicago Police Delete Journalism Professor’s Video Footage Of Arrest. Sadly, Miller’s blog is never left wanting for new content.

And in the UK, there’s a particularly laughable sign that’s been erected outside the Aldwych tube station (part of the London Underground system), banning DSLR cameras. Tim Allen found the sign and posted it to a twitter picture service. The sign reads “Due to their combination of high-quality sensor and high resolution, digital SLR cameras are unfortunately not permitted inside the station.” Amateur Photographer has a bit more information, and a follow-up as officials try to justify the ban. The British Journal of Photography has continued pressure on Transport for London, including a Freedom of Information request to get all government information relating to the ban.

Still in the UK, if you haven’t seen it before, Stand Your Ground is worth a watch. A group of photographers set out on the streets of London to exercise their right to photograph that which is in public view. They were interrupted in a variety of ways by representatives of private property, but received support from London police. It’s a great video.

As always, know your rights as a photographer. There are two good online summaries for US photographers, one by Bert P. Krages, an attorney who works on photo-related issues, and another by the ACLU. If anyone knows of similar resources for photographers from other countries, please send them along or post them in the comments below.

UPDATE (20 March 2013): TurnHere is now known as SmartShoot and remains a rights grab.

We try to publicize good opportunities for photographers through the blog here and our deadline calendar. In deciding whether or not to include a contest or call for entry on our calendar, we look at the terms and conditions of submitting work to the contest. A good contest, in line with Pro-Imaging’s Bill of Rights Standards for Photography Competitions, promotes the winners’ work while respecting them and their work. Usually, this means by entering or winning a contest, the photographer retains all rights to his or her images and that the contest and its sponsors can use the submitted or winning images only to publicize the contest and its winners and only for a short time period. All of the contests on our calendar conform to these basic guidelines.

But we see a lot of contests that have bad conditions for entry, usually in the form of a “rights grab,” which you’ve also probably encountered in contracts for assignment photography. A “rights grab” takes your copyright away from you, preventing you from reselling your work ever again and, potentially, from even showing your work in your portfolio. It’s a dirty tactic, and it’s sad to see how many photo contests have rights grabs. A good rule of thumb is that any contest run by a travel-related company (airlines, luggage companies, resorts, etc.) is a rights grab. For the organizations in charge, running these contests is a quick, easy and cheap way to build an image library for its future use. Why should an airline company, for instance, pay fees to photographers to take pictures of tropical destinations when all of their paying customers will just send in their travel pictures for free? It’s a bad deal for photographers. Your rights have value. Here’s a short mention of one photographer earning upwards of $140,000 by relicensing images to the same client over 8 years. Had the photographer worked under a buyout, work-for-hire, or other rights grab situation, he would have made nothing beyond the initial fee. Had he submitted them to a rights-grabbing photo contest, he would have made nothing at all.

I thought I’d share two rights grabs that recently caught my attention because they at first seemed like interesting opportunities for me to gain exposure and future work.

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National Geographic’s My Montana contest features a pretty standard rights grab. It’s particularly sad to see National Geographic taking advantage of photographers in this way, especially since the organization has been so supportive of photography and photographers since the beginning of the craft. Here’s the rights grab, from the contest’s rules‘, Section 4:

Submission of an entry grants Sponsor and their agents a license and right to use, publish, adapt, edit and/or modify such entry in any way, in whole or in part, and to use such entry alone or in combination with other works, as solely determined by Sponsor, in commerce and trade and in any and all media now known or hereafter discovered, worldwide, including but not limited to the Website, without limitation or compensation to the Entrant and without right of notice, review or approval of any such use of the entry.

Reading that section, it’s clear that by entering a photo in the contest, you give National Geographic and the State of Montana the unlimited, perpetual, worldwide right to use and publish your photos anywhere for any purpose. National Geographic could publish your photos in one of their books, or sell it as a poster on their website, and you wouldn’t see a dime. If Montana’s Office of Tourism wants to put your photo on a billboard in Times Square or on the side of a train in Minneapolis, they don’t have to pay you. And they could do it now, next month, or 300 years from now, and you wouldn’t know. I personally know the value of this. Montana’s Office of Tourism recently contacted me to license a photo for this year’s winter tourism guide (page 9 of this PDF). It was a very small usage, but it paid for rent. Had I submitted the photo to the contest, it wouldn’t have won and they could have used the picture for free. I would have lost twice, and possibly many times in the future, too.

I tried contacting National Geographic through the contest website and twitter, but have not gotten a response.

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About a month ago I received an email from TurnHere with the subject line: “Hiring Professional Freelance Photographers.” The email said, “We’re growing our network of professional photographers and like what we’ve seen of your work. TurnHere provides paid shoot jobs to our photographers on behalf of some of the world’s premier brands (Google, Microsoft, Audi, . . .) and we’d like to invite you to apply to our network as part of our early access program.” Corporate work is a growing part of my business, and it looked like an interesting opportunity. After seeing the website, it looked even better: more than $12 million paid to creatives, $100,000 made by a single person this year, 600+ jobs currently available through the system. Sounds great! But the Independent Contractor agreement is really ugly. For instance, Section 4.a and b:

TurnHere is the sole and exclusive owner of, and Independent Contractor hereby irrevocably assigns to TurnHere all Deliverables, regardless of whether such Deliverables are specified in any Project description, and all rights, title, interest, and ownership throughout the world in any Deliverable, including all Intellectual Property Rights in and to any Deliverable. Independent Contractor hereby irrevocably and unconditionally waives all enforcement of each of the foregoing rights. All Deliverables are and will belong exclusively to TurnHere, with TurnHere having the right to obtain and to hold in its name, any and all Intellectual Property Rights. … In jurisdictions such as Canada, where moral rights may not be assigned, Independent Contractor irrevocably and expressly waives in favor of TurnHere and agrees never to assert any and all “moral rights” that it may have in any Deliverable.

That’s hard to parse, but what it means is that you never own any pictures you take as part of TurnHere and that you can’t even show them as part of your portfolio. More than that, there’s no requirement that your work will be credited to you once it’s used in an advertising campaign. You’ll get paid (though I don’t know the rates) but you’ll have nothing to show afterward. Everything you do for the job becomes the property of TurnHere. This hurts you in a couple of ways. You can’t relicense any of your pictures to the original client or future clients. This may not seem like a big deal when you’re looking at a commission and don’t have a lot of other work, but subsequent licensing fees can and should be a part of your future business. I know a couple of photographers who’ve recently paid for cars and houses through corporate use of photos that started out in an editorial assignment.

Steer well clear of TurnHere and any other such deals. By taking part in such a scheme, you’re crippling your future earnings and making it difficult even to market yourself through your previous work. TurnHere suggests that by working through them, you’ll be able to associate yourself with some of the world’s top brands, but reading the above excerpt of their agreement about “moral rights,” your name will not be associated with the pictures you make for these companies. The only way to get work is to show your previous work. Here, you don’t have the right to show your photos without permission of TurnHere after the fact. By agreeing to work for TurnHere, you’ve pulled the rug out from under yourself before you’ve even begun.

I emailed back and forth with a representative from TurnHere to try to figure out what was going on here, and they seemed receptive to input from potential contributors. But communication died off without getting an official response from the company.

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The sad fact is that rights grabs are becoming more and more common. The good news is that sometimes you can negotiate away a rights grab in a contract. I’ve had to do just that a few times this year. In a couple of cases, I was successful and achieved a decent fee for a limited usage of my work. In other cases, I’ve had to turn down the work because it was a bad deal for me. And I’m not a copyright absolutist. Everything can be had at a price. If someone wants to pay a million dollars for perpetual, exclusive rights to a photo shoot, I’m all ears. I have sold full copyright to one image in my career, and it was for a very nice fee.

Contests with terms such as in National Geographic’s My Montana contest and assignment contracts such as TurnHere’s make the future sustainability of a photographer’s career all but impossible. The best way to protect yourself is to educate yourself and keep your rights. You never know what images will sell down the line, and you don’t want to decimate your future earnings. A good place to start with learning about contracts and rights is with John Harrington’s excellent Best Business Practices for Photographers book. And here are a few tips on how to avoid a rights grab and how to deal with rights grabbing photo releases common in the music industry.

UPDATE (20 March 2013): TurnHere is now known as SmartShoot and remains a rights grab.

Google Image Search recently received a major upgrade in the form of a search by image function. By uploading an image to the search engine, or using an image url, Google finds images that it thinks are the same or similar. Reverse image search isn’t new–TinEye has been doing it for a while–but Google’s massive indexing capabilities make it a cut above the rest. These tools are useful for finding the source of images online, and for photographers, offer a powerful opportunity to find copyright violations. But uploading an image each time you want to do an image search can be tedious. Enter src-img.

With src-img, a javascript bookmarklet that you drag to your browser’s bookmarks bar, all images on a page are overlaid with a ?¿ link, as in the screenshot at the top of this post. Clicking the ?¿ opens up a Google Image Search on the image (here’s an example from the image above, with a copyright violation I’ve just now found…). It streamlines the whole process.

Now, once you’ve found an infringement, you’ve got to figure out what to do about it. Photo Attorney Carolyn Wright offers both a list of ideas of what to do once your work has been infringed, and, on the PhotoShelter blog, ways you can protect your images from infringement online.

Earlier this year, we wrote about two US states trying to outlaw unauthorized photos of farm operations (The Florida was changed in a few important ways after our initial report). That’s been the most tweeted and shared post in the history of dvafoto, and generated a great conversation on the value and imperative of photography of American agriculture. Of the many comments and messages I got from that post, one of the most intriguing was from a California-based photographer named Barron Bixler. He’s been working on a project on agriculture in the San Joaquin Valley, A New Pastoral, and wanted to start a dialog about these issues. As he said in his introductory email, “I’m sick of shouting into the wind about these issues and would love to start a meaningful conversational thread about it with someone who’s similarly implicated.” So that’s what we’ve got here below. Be sure to check out the rest of Bixler’s work, and if you’re near Fresno, California, between August 19 and January 6, 2012, you can see A New Pastoral: Views of the San Joaquin Valley in a solo exhibition at the Fresno Art Museum.

dvafoto: Why do you photograph the agricultural industry?

Barron Bixler: I’m going to begin with a fairly provocative comparison, so bear with me.

Last week I stumbled across a talk given by photography luminary Fred Ritchin in which he quotes one of the founders of Doctors Without Borders on the power of photography to document events that would otherwise go unseen: “Without a photograph we’ve never been able to prove a massacre….If we have no photographs, there are no massacres.”

Reading this quote within the context of agriculture, many will rightly ask what human rights abuse has to do with where produce comes from. The short answer is, more than you’d think. In September 2010, the “guest worker” recruiting firm Global Horizons was charged with operating the largest forced agricultural labor ring ever prosecuted by the federal government. Sadly, the Global Horizons case is anomalous only in its scale. Google “florida agricultural slavery” and you’ll get a cross section of entries that expose the high cost of cheap produce.

My own approach to photographing industrial agriculture operations in California is decidedly ambivalent, and my focus is on the land rather than the people who work it, but in the back of my mind there’s always this same nagging question: what price have we paid (and do we continue to pay) to farm in this massive, industrial way? Even Monsanto—the company that 50 years ago repurposed Agent Orange into commercial pesticides and has been a driving force behind the Green Revolution—has tacitly admitted that indiscriminate and ongoing pesticide use is probably not environmentally sustainable. So when we look at our industrial food system as it’s existed since the 1940s, and at the downstream social and environmental consequences of that system, what we’re left with is a fairly disquieting picture.

Through our federal ag and trade policy over the last century, we’ve engineered our food system in a way that measures success as a ratio of units of input to units of output. And while this all sounds good and highly rational in that 1940s-systems-engineering-fetish sort of way, the problem is the units of input aren’t abstract concepts or inert materials. They’re farmers and farm workers. They’re animals. They’re entire communities and ecosystems. All of which we’ve placed on the same level in our equation of success as John Deere tractors and gallons of petrochemical fertilizer.

At the same time, as consumers of food, you and I gobble up the seductive myth of the independent family farmer and allow ourselves to indulge, if momentarily, the belief that Hidden Valley Ranch is an actual place tucked away in the rolling coastal hills of California. (For a case in point, read The Story of Hidden Valley.)

Just today I passed a billboard in Oakland, California proclaiming that “99% of California Dairy Farms are Family Owned.” A quick visit to the California Milk Advisory Board website confirms the source of this latest campaign. Watch some of CMAB’s gorgeous short documentaries about family-run dairies and you might be willing to forget, just for a minute, well documented cases of migrant dairy workers drowning in toxic manure evaporation lagoons the size of football fields or official reports from the USDA, EPA and others about the role industrial dairies and feedlots play in global climate change and the pollution of local air, soil and water.

If nothing else, I hope my pictures of California agriculture destabilize our cozy vision of where most of our food comes from—and more importantly, what it leaves behind. After all, if we have no photographs to show how things are, there’s nothing a good marketing agency or PR crisis response firm or government information ministry can’t get us to swallow: whether it’s rounding up political dissidents for a massacre or the latest formulation of Roundup PowerMAX®.

You say you work both with permission of the farmers and without. Do the farmers you work with know that you have such a critical stance on their practices?

A few months back I posted a question on Twitter to the effect of, “As a documentarian, where do one’s loyalties lie? To ‘objectivity,’ or to the people who trust you to photograph them?” The question was prompted by a piece on the NYT Lens blog called “Bonding with Subjects in Harm’s Way” in which Finbar O’Reilly recounts personal experiences photographing U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.

For documentary photographers, these are the large and rather prickly horns of the dilemma that defines our discipline: to what extent can or should you strive for objectivity when your subjects are engaged in practices that are, at best, ethically muddy? How do you separate out the complicity of the individual from the larger system of which he or she is a part? How does your empathy toward or dependence on your subjects (in Mr. O’Reilly’s case this most certainly was a matter of life or death; in my case it’s more a matter of access and good will) affect your capacity to remain dispassionate and brutally honest? Who or what are your pictures ultimately in service of?
Read on »

We’ve covered photographers being treated as criminals previously (and look at Photography is Not a Crime, or Thomas Hawk’s collection of related posts), and now some photographers in London are pushing back against illegal limitations on photographers. In the video above–skip to 1:15 for the actual video–six photographers took to the streets of London to take pictures on public space. All six were approached by guards asking them to stop taking pictures for “security reasons” or because of concerns over terrorism. Three of the incidents elevated to police involvement, but happily, the police stated that the photographers were all allowed to continue taking pictures. In one case, the photographer thanks the police officer for not asking to see or delete the photos, and the officer responds that not only was he not interested in doing so, but he couldn’t because he didn’t have reasonable suspicion of any wrongdoing. The video was apparently produced as part of the London Street Photography Festival 2011.

In the US, there’ve been some recent run-ins between Transportation Security Administration officials in airports and photographers wanting to take pictures or video of security screening areas. Here’s one video that a videographer rescued from his camera after police forced him to delete his video, and here’s another couple of videos that brought attention on the TSA blog about whether security screening areas can be photographed. The TSA blog outlines the current regulations regarding photography at TSA checkpoints, thus: “We don’t prohibit public, passengers or press from photographing, videotaping, or filming at screening locations. You can take pictures at our checkpoints as long as you’re not interfering with the screening process or slowing things down. We also ask that you do not film or take pictures of our monitors.”

The NPPA has also recently pushed the issue with the TSA and gotten an official response from Margot Bester, Principle Deputy of the TSA’s Office of Chief Counsel, dated 22 June 2011 (pdf copy of letter). Here’s the relevant passage from that letter: “…TSA’ s goal is to protect passenger’s rights, including the right to record at passenger screening checkpoints, while ensuring that passenger screening operations can take place in an effective and efficient manner.”

The NPPA also points to the Department of Homeland Security’s official bulletin on rules and laws regarding photographing federal facilities in the US, which includes the statement that “officers should not seize the camera or its contents and must be cautious not to give such ‘orders’ to a photographer to erase the contents of a camera, as this constitutes a seizure or detention.”

Also, for photographers in the US, be sure to know your rights. There’s a handy pdf at that link that you can print out and keep in your wallet or camera bag.

“After stopping the car I noticed that he was shabbily dressed, needed a shave and a haircut, also a bath. Subject talked with a foreign accent. I talked to the subject a few minutes and looked into the car where I noticed it was heavily loaded with suitcases, trunks and a number of cameras.” -from the police report of the arrest of Robert Frank in Arkansas on Nov. 7, 1955

And all of this is nothing new. Here’s a story in the Telegraph that starts out with an account of Robert Frank getting hassled by police in Arkansas while photographing The Americans, and here is the arrest report.