There is no overarching ban on photography, nor is their likely to be. Yet, as a new Manifesto Club report by gallery director Pauline Hadaway outlines, there is growing regulation of citizen photography, with touchy subjects now ranging from policemen to transport facilities, from children's nativity plays to football matches.
This is a model of how liberty is lost today: often not with a blanket draconian law, but through incoherent and creeping restriction at a local level, with rules drawn up by community safety wardens, private security guards and other self-appointed "jobsworths".
Leaving aside the headline-grabbing misuse of counter-terror laws, it is the restrictions on photographing children that perhaps have had the most devastating social impact. A generation of kids is growing up with gaps in the family photo album: no first-swim photos, no videos of the school play, no shots of football matches or swimming galas. If I flick back through my childhood photo album, about half the photos would now not be there.
One of the first restrictions on photographing children came in 2002, with Edinburgh city council's ban on photography in nativity plays and concerts. Such photo bans are now the norm. The National Association of Clubs for Young People advised its membership to remove pictures of children receiving trophies or playing sports from club websites. The Child Protection in Sport Unit suggests that sports clubs consider using illustrations of children rather than photos.
Some organisations have resorted to pixelating out kids' faces, giving a nine-year old footballer the treatment normally reserved for criminal suspects. One representative from the Churches Conservation Trust complained to me that in its brochures it could only show the "backs of children's heads", asking: "Who wants a photo of the back of the head?"
Where there is no explicit ban, there are often contorted and bizarre restrictions on the kinds of photos that may be taken. Some organisations require that parent photographers have explicit permission – signed and dated forms – from any young tennis or football players who feature in photos of their child's match. One school demands that parents only picture their child "against a wall/fence/hedge where they are sure that no other child is in the photo". Some child protection officials even prescribe which particular parts of a child's body may be photographed. The Child Protection in Sport Unit recommends that photos of children swimming are shot "from waist or shoulder up". Given that swimming is based on the arms and legs, a "shoulder up" photo is not ideal.
Such restrictions are justified on the basis of implausible scenarios – including that football match photos could be "adapted for inappropriate use", for example pasted on a child pornography website; or that paedophiles could use the match photos to identify children to target for "grooming".
This is not about the paedophile, but about a new view of the citizen. The gaze of the citizen is presumed to be malevolent, and anyone who takes photos gets the question "Why are you taking photos?" As Hadaway says, "looking becomes itself identified with predation". Worse, this is a view internalised by many citizens themselves. One teacher stopped taking photos of his nursery school's events when a parent commented, "Likes his photos – probably got an ulterior motive."
Nursery photos might not seem like the forefront of the fight for liberty, but these are strange times and regulation works in strange ways. We need to shift our frame accordingly, and defend the citizen photographer at football matches and nativity plays across the country.