1. Chemical plants, with their tangles of pipes, catwalks, and scale, have obvious aesthetic appeal, especially when a refinery running at full capacity burns off waste gas at night. I also offer the climactic scene in “White Heat” where Jimmy Cagney flees the cops at a refinery, then goes out in a blaze of glory.

2. Most pictures tourists take have far more personal than aesthetic appeal. Not much market among the artsy-fartsy types for pictures of your kids eating cotton candy on the line for Space Mountain. Grandma likes them, though.

They don’t really. Terrorism is just an excuse. Since the Rodney King beating in the 80′s conventional wisdom among police has been that the guy with the camera is your enemy.

When does the state decide all people are threats and must be eliminated? Didn’t this plot happen like 1,000 times on Star Trek and other SciFi shows?

” officers make such judgments “based on their overall training and experience” and will generally approach photographers not engaging in “regular tourist behavior.”

In other words, based only on their general mood of thuggishness.

#8 | MacGregory | August 14th, 2011 at 11:19 pm

I find the whole “we can tell when people are lying” thing to be comical as well, considering it’s being uttered by the biggest bunch of fucking liars on this planet.

It takes one to know one?

I personally love the look of factories and industrial equipment, especially power generation. I guess my portfolio of industrial, wind, and oil and gas works is now aiding and abetting terrorism? Do I need to take my flickr account down in case some guy in a cave (in Afghanistan or in Utah, take your pick) decides to check them out?

Also, why do these cops always think that the photographer strolling around the front gate with their obvious camera is the suspicious terrorist? It’s 2011, have they not heard of smart phones and pocket cameras? Hell, there are phones out there with higher resolution then my old Nikon.

I’ve always thought that if someone really wanted to do surveillance for nefarious reasons they’d do it while strategically hidden and with something above a 300mm. Or pretend they are texting on their smart phone. I guess I have read too many spy novels and figure they wouldn’t want to be noticed. What the hell do I know about all this crazy, complex “protection biznes” stuff anyways, I just live here.

It’s Trinity University in San Antonio (class of ’99) :)

“Now we got a nice, quiet little beach community here, and I aim to keep it nice and quiet. So let me make something plain. I don’t like you sucking around, bothering our citizens, Wolff. I don’t like your jerk-off name. I don’t like your jerk-off face. I don’t like your jerk-off photos, and I don’t like you, jerk-off. Do I make myself clear?”

+1 Creedence tape

Seriously, did they even do this kind of shit back in the old Soviet Union?

Yes, they did. I spent quite a bit of time in the old USSR, and I took a lot of photos. But, we were very explicitly warned not to take photos of military installations, etc. For the most part, though, those were moot points, as our travels were rather closely monitored: we didn’t come anywhere near anything that was sensitive.

The fact that the US has morphed into the USSR does not make me happy.

@14: Don’t you know we are living in the End Times, we no longer need to document things for future generations.

Asif Kahn detains Sander Roscoe Wolff for suspicion of terrorist activities. How ironic is that?

There’s some hardcore bootlicking going on there.

After all, beauty is the in the eye of the bee holder.

Ahem. Sorry.

On a more serious note, what we have here is an extension of the “principle” that cops or other authorities can decide who is and is not a “journalist” worthy of full 1st Amendment press protections, including “edgy” stuff such as the protection of sources. We have, so far, let them get away with that. It’s only a small step from there to deciding who’s an “artist”.