{"id":558,"date":"2009-02-10T18:14:24","date_gmt":"2009-02-10T18:14:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/?p=558"},"modified":"2009-02-10T18:14:24","modified_gmt":"2009-02-10T18:14:24","slug":"law-makes-an-ass-of-itself","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/?p=558","title":{"rendered":"Law makes an Ass of itself?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Robert Kabakoff<\/em> is an actor who has appeared in a couple of films, but now is more famous as a photographer. Cycling through Central Park in New York last April he saw a woman getting a bit of sun on her nether regions, “laying on her stomach with her skirt pulled up over her butt<\/em>” and felt this would make an amusing picture.<\/p>\n

So he jumped off his bike and took a snap with his phone from around 15 feet. One of the woman’s friends noticed him and the woman complained to a cop. Kabakoff was handcuffed and taken in a police car to the station, where he was charged with “unlawful surveillance<\/em>” and spent the night in jail – it was 18 hours before he was released.<\/p>\n

Perhaps because Kabakoff is a graduate of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice<\/em> he had the sense to sue the City, and he settled out of court for $8,000 which paid for him to have a month in Paris.<\/p>\n

Most of the details above come from a report on the NY Daily News<\/a> web site, but rather more interesting to us is the commentary by Carolyn E Wright<\/em> on her Photo Attorney<\/a> blog, where she makes clear exactly what that offence means.\u00a0\u00a0 It does outlaw surreptitious photography of people “dressing or undressing or the sexual or other intimate parts of such person<\/em>” but only when that person has a reasonable expectation of privacy. Clearly this cannot apply in a public open space such as Central Park.<\/p>\n

But I wouldn’t want to encourage people to follow Kabakoff’s example. It may be legal (at least in the UK), but I think it is also rather likely to cause offence – as it did. Of course there are times when there is a real public interest in taking pictures that cause offence, but this clearly doesn’t seem to me to be one of them.<\/p>\n

I also found the story mentioned on the War On Photography<\/a> site, which has previously awarded the New York City Police Department one of its
\nHonorary Order of Lenin Awards<\/a>.
\nThis site is also the first place I’ve found with a link which works in the UK to the Colbert Report<\/a> programme on the ‘Amtrak Photo Incident.’\u00a0 It’s a rather heavy-handed American comedy report on an incident in which a member of the NPPA found himself arrested for taking pictures on a railway station – and what was he doing? Taking pictures to enter in the photo competition run by the railway company, Amtrak. He still intends to enter the competition.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Robert Kabakoff is an actor who has appeared in a couple of films, but now is more famous as a photographer. Cycling through Central Park in New York last April he saw a woman getting a bit of sun on her nether regions, “laying on her stomach with her skirt pulled up over her butt” … Continue reading Law makes an Ass of itself?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-558","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-photo-issues"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=558"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=558"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=558"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=558"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}