Ban on Subway Photography Prompts Underground Protest
By ALAN FEUER
Published: June 7, 2004

At a protest by photographers, you see things like a guy taking pictures of a guy taking pictures of a few more guys taking pictures of one another. There was such a protest yesterday, but it might take hundreds of pages to describe it, given all the pictures that were taken, each one worth at least a thousand words.

The photographers - about 100 of them - gathered to express their outrage at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's proposed ban on taking pictures in the subway system. Meeting at Grand Central Terminal, they rode the trains for upward of an hour, shutters clicking, flashes popping, in a filmed rebuke to the idea that photography is somehow a national security threat.

"The point is really to make everyday people wake up and realize that photographers are not terrorists," said Joe Anastasio, who organized the event. "In the last few years, photographers near anything vaguely important have been getting harassed."

Mr. Anastasio went on to tell the story of a friend who took his wife's picture near the Whitestone Bridge, only to be called in for questioning by the police. He told another of a man caught snapping pictures at a Metro-North station who was interrogated for nearly two hours by authorities at the scene.

"The paranoia," he said, "has gone a little too far."

The transit authority's proposal, posted on its Web site, says the agency is planning to adopt "a general prohibition against photography and videotaping in the system." The agency is soliciting public comment on the ban and plans to vote on the proposal in the next few months.

"It's a security measure," said a spokeswoman for the agency, Deirdre Parker. "It was suggested by the N.Y.P.D."

Mr. Anastasio and his fellow photographers said it was ridiculous that pictures of the subway might somehow make the trains unsafe. After all, they said, there are thousands of subway photographs already on the Internet.

"The subway is so well documented that what's the point?" asked Jean Miele, a fine art and commercial photographer. "This sort of thing makes us less free, not safer."