I have been working on scanning some old work and came across these images of Chicago's Thompson Center photographed at night with a 4x5 view camera. I used to spend a lot of time lurking around the city with this large camera and tripod tipped on my shoulder. A 4x5 camera is a strange looking thing and a person using one today looks a little out of the ordinary; it attracts attention. I would occasionally have to stop what I was doing to let curious passers-by duck under the darkcloth and look at the inverted image on the ground glass – it was the quickest way to stay their curiosity. Looking at this image it occurred to me that it might be considerably more difficult to shoot today. Although the laws haven't changed significantly regarding photography in public places, the public has been asked to vigilantly report suspicious behavior and photography itself has become suspicious. Security expert Bruce Schneier has called this the War on the Unexpected – a sharp criticism of a policy that rewards and congratulates people for reporting suspicious things like packets of hot sauce, bat detectors, imams, ect. In today's world a person standing with his head under a cloth attached to a contraption pointed at a building is unexpected and certain to bring the attention of security.

While the police occupy a rank in a fairly transparent government organization where it's never difficult to find out who's the boss of whom, the security officer lurks at the bottom of impenetrable ocean of bureaucracy and when they contrive rules like 'photography of this building is prohibited' a person is left with very little recourse. Over the years Amtrak has been a source of constant frustration for photographers. In fact their policy toward security and photography has been so mixed up that they even attracted the attention of the Colbert Report when Amtrak police arrested photographer Duane Kerzic while taking photos for Amtrak's own "Picture our Train" photo contest:

Amtrak vs. Duane - 02/02/09 from swatspyder on Vimeo.

And here is a video of reporter Tom Fitzgerald, with the Washington DC Fox affiliate, interviewing Cliff Black, Amtrak's chief spokesman, at Union Station. While Black is trying to explain the photography is allowed at Union Station, a security guard arrives to tell them otherwise.

You can't make this stuff up…unless you happen to be Franz Kafka who is quickly overshadowing Orwell and Huxley as the dystopian prophet of our age. While we've been worrying about the tyrants, the clerks took over and they are making lots of rules. Officially banning photography of things that are plainly visible in public yet deemed sensitive targets is the due diligence du jour. The New York Port Authority, for instance, has a long list of spaces where photography is restricted. Here are some photos of their no photos signs for those who thrive on irony.

As it has become more difficult for individuals to take photographs in public, it has also become more difficult to walk out in public without businesses or government agencies taking photos of you. Security cameras have become ubiquitous. Security cameras that can actually recognize you are not far away. In March of 2006 the little Alaska village of Dillingham made national news when the local government installed about 80 cameras with funds from a $202,000 Homeland Security grant. This is to keep watch over the town of 2,400 people that is only accessible by air and sea. The reason? I paraphrase: you never know, terrorists are unpredictable. Regardless of the reason, the fact that the government seeks increasing license to photograph individuals while curtailing the individual's right to photograph the government represents an inversion of individual liberty – the idealogical bedrock for a free society.

Why does photography in particular arouse suspicion? If you were to set up an easel and begin painting a New York City bridge you are unlikely to be bothered even though painting en plein air is much less common than photography and in skilled hands the medium is just as capable as photography at recording details. One of the reasons is what Bruce Schneier has called movie plot threats. We want to predict things like terrorist attacks, but since they are exceedingly rare we don't have much empirical data on which to base predictions. When we imagine what threats might look like, these imaginings looks remarkably similar to Tom Clancy's. We've all seen the would-be bad guy performing photo surveillance in the movies so that must be how it's done even through nobody can really explain why a photograph of a bridge that has been photographed many times before is particularly useful to someone with bad intention.

Perhaps our discomfort with photography in the public sphere arises from the photograph's indiscriminate capture of information which we might not notice with our eyes. In an age preoccupied with managing risk whether from terrorists, business competition, or lawsuits, a technology that has the potential to reveal previously unnoticed facts is understandably viewed with caution. Walter Benjamin, casting his long shadow into our time, compared this aspect of film with psychoanalysis in 1936. Given this interpretation, we might have misgivings of photographers in public for the same reason we would not submit ourselves to public psychotherapy ( Facebook and Twitter notwithstanding ).

The film has enriched our field of perception with methods which can be illustrated by those of Freudian theory. Only exceptionally may such a slip have revealed dimensions of depth in a conversation which had seemed to be taking its course on the surface. Since the Psychopathology of Everyday Life things have changed. This book isolated and made analyzable things which had heretofore floated along unnoticed in the broad stream of perception. For the entire spectrum of optical, and now also acoustical, perception the film has brought about a similar deepening of apperception. It is only an obverse of this fact that behavior items shown in a movie can be analyzed much more precisely and from more points of view than those presented on paintings or on the stage. As compared with painting, filmed behavior lends itself more readily to analysis because of its incomparably more precise statements of the situation. In comparison with the stage scene, the filmed behavior item lends itself more readily to analysis because it can be isolated more easily. This circumstance derives its chief importance from its tendency to promote the mutual penetration of art and science. Actually, of a screened behavior item which is neatly brought out in a certain situation, like a muscle of a body, it is difficult to say which is more fascinating, its artistic value or its value for science. To demonstrate the identity of the artistic and scientific uses of photography which heretofore usually were separated will be one of the revolutionary functions of the film.

By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring common place milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action. Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling. With the close-up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended. The enlargement of a snapshot does not simply render more precise what in any case was visible, though unclear: it reveals entirely new structural formations of the subject

—The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction