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Soon after I took this photo above, standing by the entrance of Leeds University, and as I was waiting for a sudden wave of rain to pass - among shiny bikes and a man whose posture and reflection had intrigued me… well, very soon after that a security guard came out from his box running quickly towards me.

He bombarded me with questions, who I am and what am I taking pictures of… My mind was still wandering in search of aesthetic pleasures; how to find the best angle, selecting shutter speed and aperture. I was not prepared and got surprised from his sudden attack. I simply said, I take a photo of bikes and a back-lit silhouette… (Should an aspiring conceptual photographer ever admit these casual things, I thought…)

But the security guard was not friendly. He insisted making questions. I noticed his threatening body language and persistent eye-contact in order to intimidate. Later he revealed that he used to work for some kind of special forces. His glorious and authoritative past, who knows why he was dismissed, was obviously filling him up with pride and nostalgia.

The treatment was unacceptable. After all I had been running the University’s Photosociety for two years in the recent past and we always used to practice making rounds in the campus. Not to mention the hundreds of graduates taking pictures of each other around those areas very regularly. Maybe it was about the beard in my face and my foreign accent didn’t help either… (Should I start shaving every time before using my camera outdoors, I thought…).

But he even used all sorts of lies and excuses trying to intimidate me, about how a special licence is required from the media services (something they denied later when I asked them), about his official orders to follow this procedure with everyone, even threats about calling the police were thrown to me… I replied that yes, he’s welcomed to call the police and look very silly when try to explain the reason of calling them. But the whole incident was not simply redicilous and patronising, it was also offending and very upsetting.

This happened two summers ago. I’m afraid though things don’t get better rather worst. The Metropolitan Police (click at the poster below) has just launched its five-week counter-terrorism campaign asking members of the public to report any suspicious behaviour. Yes, you guessed well. Taking photographs is a suspicious behaviour.

It seems that now you can - or have to - call the authorities every time you feel reporting a suspicious photographer. What exactly is suspicious, what is an ‘odd’ photograph? Well, not easy to answer… Sometimes an act appears odd just because someone looks odd and different, or because of our own preconceptions. And anyway, everyone has their own ideas about it, it cannot really be defined… But, in fact, this is probably the point: To spy and report each other! The poster states it clearly: Report it and “Let experienced officers decide what action to take.”

I know. Many readers have already began wondering in despair: Isn’t this campaign an open invitation to arbitrary and/or selective abuse? Isn’t this another badly disguised excuse for further erosion of our freedoms? Actually, isn’t this quite naive in its assumed counter-terrorist potential, when considering its adverse social effect by increasing fear and paranoia, and posing a high risk of weakening the social bonds, is therefore rather undermining than strengthening the sense of security?

Fear and paranoia.

Remember these words. These were the underlying forces of the security guard’s over-reaction against me, and that was what in turn he wanted to install upon me. Now, with even a seemingly official support in place, the absurdity is reinforced… Photographers of this country be aware and prepared. And resist the identification of terror.

The scary, and final, thought is that these practices remind how the Gestapo used to operate in Nazi Germany. Unlike the general belief, the Gestapo was not a huge and omnipotent organisation. As historian Robert Gellatel (see wikipedia) has shown, it was mainly made up by clerical workers and bureaucrats, who “were for the most part dependent upon denunciations for information about what was happening in German society. The willingness of ordinary Germans to denounce one another supplied the Gestapo with the information that determined who the Gestapo arrested.”

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On Tuesday 11 March 2007, 6pm, there is a relevant and interesting public talk taking place in the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, University of London, Senate House, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HU.

The title is: “How Safe Do You Feel: Surveillance, Photographers, and the Privatisation of Public Space Post 9/11“

It is presented by freelance documentary photographer, writer and researcher, Dr. John Perivolaris (click at his photo above to visit work from his recent documentary project). The seminar is open to everyone and here is the abstract of the seminar as published in the website of the hosting University:

“On the streets of cities in the United States and Europe we are witnessing a dramatic proliferation of surveillance cameras trained on citizens’ every move through increasingly privatised public spaces. For example, the average Londoner is daily caught on camera 300 times. But, while the citizen is constantly watched, they are increasingly restricted from photographing those same spaces. What is the place of independent photography and image-making of public space post-9/11? How are photographers to resist the plethora of restrictions to which they are now subject in the name of security? Is the right to watch swiftly becoming a monopoly of the state? Is democratic citizenship also now a struggle for the right to see as well as to be seen?”

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At the same time that these important questions are posed here, in another country Greece, left over surveillance equipment from the Olympic Games, costing over $250 million, has divided the country over its use to spy citizens. As reported by the BBC (see below), the emerging debate is around not only the question whether Greece will be following Britain’s example of spying its citizens, but whether it can resist the powerful march of the cameras. The costly surveillance equipment has taken its own reified form of existance. Note that Olympics are coming to Britain in few years time.

The Rolling Exhibition began as a simple photograph taken while Kevin Connolly was skating down a backstreet in Vienna some time ago. Kevin kept travelling balancing his torso on a skateboard, and now, after rolling through the streets of 31 cities in 15 countries, he exhibits what he collected: the stare.

The stare, or ‘the gaze’, the expression of social power, which normalises and disciplines populations of our times, according to Foucault and other scholars, has captivated and excited - with its conceptual potency - our understanding of society and self.

What is the power relationship here? It is between able-bodied and non able-bodied people as social actors. What does this mean in actual terms? In brief, that the different power these groups have, and had in recent centuries, has heavily influenced and crystallised, or ‘naturalised as they say in sociology, the way that we see or know things. Social norms are constructed, and made to appear as natural, pre-existing our societies; which then used to discipline those who deviate, assumed to breach the ‘natural order’, but also used to regulate all of us.

And any kind of natural and normal able-bodiedness is of course just and only an assumption. That people must have a particular bodily and mental structure, that there is something called ‘normal humanity’ or ‘normal human body’, let’s say something which requires to have two legs, is just the effect of theological, social, political and economical discourses which forcefully and violently have achieved this to be seen as ‘truth’. In brief, any idea of what is a ‘natural human body’ is a result of social processes, not of any natural norms. And to claim the opposite, that yes there is a natural biological body does not stand well to criticism. Not historically (because it changes meaning through time and space), or logically (the metaphysics of western reason), or empirically (the social normalisation of any difference involves, for example, even such practices as those by doctors who surgically shape new-born babies’ genitalia to ‘appropriate’ form, if these do not conform to the dualist social norm male/female).

So, Kevin Connolly has turned the gaze back, he is taking the photos of his viewers. From an object of the gaze - and devaluation - he becomes the active subject. He seems to want to record but also to make people think and narrate the content of their thoughts. Constructing the narratives, approaching the origins of their stories, the viewers -those who were photographed or us who view the photos- may become able to encounter and question one of the deepest and most hidden socially constructed identities, one which people who are entitled to they never even use it to identify with: being ‘able-bodied’.

You might remember an earlier post here presenting a text by Susan Sontag: “Photography is, first of all, a way of seeing. It is not seeing itself.” Kevin Connolly’s photographs is an attempt to introduce a new and different way of seeing.

So, how is this all responded to? I can speak for one source found through Kevin’s website, an article in the ABC News website (1/1/2007): ‘Man without legs harnesses public gaze‘

Pardon? Something is deeply wrong in this article and can be sensed even from the title! Although, it tries hard to leave behind the traditional melodramatic ‘tragic but brave’ attitude to disabled people (oh, how heroic that he can take a photograph!), in the end it sinks deep in the same boring and stereotypical presentation of disability.

Instead of going through an analysis of the photographs and the involved meanings, it focus on the photographer. Certainly, the low viewpoint that characterises Connolly’s photos does not provide much to analyse in terms of originality in abstract, it is all of course in the context that which matters.

But the article fails to talk about this context. It fails to talk about the subjects of the photographs and their projections… or any challenging implications… or the meanings we have analysed above… or how the writer/viewer feels having to identify with the gazers (is this guilt and anxiety coming through?)… or even how ‘lucky’ Kevin is to be able to have access to a photographic project because he actually can use a tool (skateboard) made for able-bodied people… Instead, it talks only and about the photographer, his medical record, his upbringing, his customs, how he deals and manages with his condition etc.

In other words, despite what Kevin Connolly tries to show with his work, the stereotypical response of the media is to refuse the re-arrangement of the stare, and politically return the gaze back!

In all its naivety the article just briefly talks about the viewers’ stares as an example of ‘human nature’ (a concept often used in order to disguise the lack of social analysis), whilst describing how cultures approach him differently, from beggar to holy man. This is something not surprising at all! Actually it confirms how tied is any, changing understanding of ability and disability with its particular society of making (not the human nature).

One final note. I felt very happy to see Kevin Connolly rejecting prosthetic legs and any other forms of normalisation. It speaks something loud and emotive. to me personally and I hope all those currently removing disabling physical barriers from all areas of social life. It’s about how agency and personal ideas, and of course difference, must be accounted and accommodated, for the potential of any new adaptations to ever become effectively enabling.

Here, at left, maybe relevant in its assumptions of a standard uniform body, Le Corbusier’s modular man. It was used as a measuring device for his architectural work and reflects his understanding that ‘man is a geometrical animal’ based upon the conception of a normal biological body. Physiological difference and diversity were simply absorbed into a system of fixed and universal standards of function and performance (Rob Imrie, 2006).