Street photography is all about catching an everyday act in the moment. It requires instinct, skill, discipline, creativity, spontaneity and a creative eye. Photographs of this nature reveal beauty in the mundane, encapsulating precious moments of time that within a blink of an eye are gone. One of my homies in Vancouver calls it “posting up“. In European cities like London they call it terrorism, pedophilia, or espionage. All to often the act of snapping a couple of unsuspecting photos results in extreme violence towards the photographer. “In the past year, the photography blogs have buzzed with tales of harassment, even violence. There’s the war photographer who dodged bullets abroad only to be beaten up in his own South London backyard by a paranoid parent who (wrongly) thought his child was being photographed. There’s the amateur photographer who was punched prostrate in the London Tube after refusing to give up his film to a stranger; the case of the man in Hull, swooped on by police after taking photographs in a shopping center. ‘Any person who appears to be taking photos in a covert manner should expect to be stopped and spoken to by police …’” ran the Humberside force’s statement, The London Times tells us.

There’s a war going on outside and no one is safe. In a society that is becoming increasingly paranoid, artists are now all to often being mistaken for a shadier type of folk that’s up to no good. So much so, that “A new poster campaign by the Metropolitan Police is inviting Londoners to call a hotline if they don’t like the look of a photographer. ‘Thousands of people take photos every day,’ runs the text. ‘What if one of them seems odd?’ The poster states that terrorists use cameras for surveillance. Life with a camera might be about to turn tougher”, we read.

For an art form that’s over a century old and deeply rooted in European culture, it’s sad how the fear of terrorism has quickly turned street photography into a sinister and questionable activity. “In France, traditionally one of the great centers of street photography, the law now says you own the rights to your own image, so street photography’s become a dead art,” says The London Times. From personal experience, I too have noticed this. Other than at typical tourist attractions, those lurking the not so frequented streets of France with an appareil-photo need to remain cautious.