Mass Photo Gathering 2010 : We are Photographers.
So here’s the situation. Armed police officers have been using laws to search, arrest, detain and stop photographers both amateurs and award wining pros from making photographs in public. There’s something a little disturbing to find that one has to look over one’s shoulder just to take snapshots while in public. So in an effort to hit back at the lunacy, PHNAT has invited everyone with a passion for the photography to gather at a mass photo gathering to stand in support for street photography, and to defend our rights, to simply photograph.
I love street photography. I love that things are always in motion around me. I love that I feel so alive when trying to capture the life and times. The streets are beautiful you know, there’s always something happening, some decisive moment that I am missing at every second corner and out on the streets, photographing people and how they interact with the world makes me feel so humble, so small and realise that I am a part of a grand scheme of things.
Some 2000 photographers descended upon Trafalgar Square at high noon on an overcast Saturday afternoon. I have never seen so many cameras concentrated in one location before. All the L lenses were out on the occasion, the Nikons certainly did not disappoint either, and the Leica Louts were standing tall and proud. There was a general atmosphere of warmth and I could tell that everybody loved their craft, be it a hobby or profession, everybody had a common passion to make photographs. Naturally, the first thing I did when I got there was to simply take pictures, and I was not alone. I could hear a harmonious wave of shutters going off. I felt comfortable, like we were one big family, and it was an amazing feeling to have the approval of everybody around us, when we wanted to take a picture. It was like being at the largest ever photo walk, and everybody knew what to do – everybody was photographing everybody else. I love photography, and today I realised I was not alone. We are photographers, we are not terrorist.
And so I was glad to have attended and support this rally. I hope this set of black and whites documenting what I saw goes a little in helping the campaign and to helping those in power understand why we love taking photographs.
Hope you’ll enjoy this one folks.
(oh and I also made a set of colour shots and you can see them at my flickr account here)
Tags: mass photo gathering, photographers, trafalgar square
This entry was posted on Monday, March 15th, 2010 at 11:19 pm and is filed under Photo Projects, middle. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.