HeraldNet: What photos expose



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November 26, 2007

What photos expose

Posted at 3:20 pm by Neal Pattison

The Sunday pages of The Herald and a gallery on HeraldNet rekindle the past. We can taste life the way it was when the Everett Elks Club was hottest spot in town.

These surviving photos inspire some people to ponder the “meaning” of Everett – what it was, how it has changed and everything that's been lost in the process.

The building will be gone soon. Memories will fade. But its significance, its reality will endure in the images.

But not all news about photography is so warm and fuzzy:

Earlier this month, an art professor filed a lawsuit against the City of Snohomish. She had been handcuffed and questioned after taking photos of electric transmission lines – power lines that any tourist, terrorist or Fed Ex driver could view from a public vantage point.

Also this month, Seattle police paid $8,000 to a free-lance photographer for wrongful arrest. He had been hauled to a precinct house and held for an hour after photographing police officers making an arrest – on a public sidewalk in full view of bystanders.

And this week, the Associated Press pressed for the release of an award-winning photojournalist, Bilal Hussein, who was arrested 19 months ago by the U.S. military in Iraq.

AP’s top executive complains that the photographer has yet to be charged with a crime – and that the military has issued a “flurry of ever-changing claims” about the case. AP President Tom Curley concludes: “We believe Bilal's crime was taking photographs the U.S. government did not want its citizens to see.”

The images that photographers capture can serve us. Or they can scare us. Instinctively, we know they represent a reality that cannot be denied or forgotten. Even if we’d prefer to.

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