Posted by Mortola (SoCal, United States) on 26 November 2007 in Business & Industry and Portfolio.
Almost eerie how the wheel is chained. Human does have control. I feel like that wheel, powerful yet restrained by so little.
27 Nov 2007 9:49pm
@ChefStalin: i feel your power brother.
neat shot. those factory lights are bright aren't they? Guess it's never really nighttime around those places.
7 Dec 2007 11:21am
@danthro: thank you. it's not a pleasant place to be taking photos, the fumes from the refineries gets overwhelming. on the evenings i take photos, i get mistaken for a terrorist. the post-911 paranoia is here to stay.
Have you been questioned by the cops? I haven't been so far, but awhile back I was taking photos in downtown Houston in the middle of the afternoon and thought I might be at any moment, as every building had a security guard that came out and watched my every move.
26 Dec 2007 11:23am
@Twelvebit: cops, security guards, ordinary citizens, i get questioned by everyone, i'm getting tired of explaining what i do and why i do it i might as well drag a sign with me saying i'm not a terrorist. it's not like the good old days anymore, post 911 America has not been kind to us street photographers.
There are probably some other social factors involved as well. I don't know how old you are, but youth is probably a factor, and race too, and sex. I'm an older (52) white guy, so in some circumstances I may be perceived as less threatening (though in others, like say, photographing women or children, the opposite might be true so I generally don't photograph women and children). I have been questioned only a few times, and never by any kind of "authority." I can feel the difference in atmosphere too, between cities like Houston and Austin --which is much more laid back (I set up on the sidewalk, late one night, to take night shots around the university right by a bunch of cops having a bull session, and not a single one of them said anything to me). I am amazed by the public antipathy to street photographers because these very same people don't say a fuckin' word about the surveillance state all around us that takes their photo everywhere they go and records their images for the use of private corporations and the State. It's like some kind of bizzaro world where someone that has just had his image captured about 500 times, from cameras planted all over the place by private and government entities, gets hot and bothered by some guy with a camera taking a single photo in a public place. What they used to say about photography prohibitions in communist Russia when I was a kid are increasingly becoming accurate descriptions of photography in the US --though with so many millions of cameras around (where they were rare in communist Russia) I don't see how they can ever put the genie back in the bottle.
28 Dec 2007 12:49pm
@Twelvebit: i'm getting up there in age and i'm about as non-threatening as a kid in a candy store, i am never arrogant with people when confronted, Southern California's demographics are an odd group, there's tension and feelings of paranoia it seems, people in certain areas and neighborhoods are not accustomed to seeing a photographer taking pictures, they are threatened by my presence and yet these same people as you mentioned never say anything about the surveillance state around them, i suppose it's easier to confront a lone photographer as oppose to a corporation or the State. I seriously fear that someday there will be photography prohibition here just like they have in those commie countries. Will camera's have to be registered, background checked and 3-day waiting period?
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