News - newspaper articles: July 2005 Archives

The National Council on Independent Living had their annual meeting in Washington in July. They voted affirmative on the following resolution:

RIGHTS OF PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES TO FOOD AND WATER RESOLUTION

Adopted at the
NCIL Annual Council Meeting
July 14,2005

WHEREAS, the right to food and water is a basic human right; and

WHEREAS, the past few years have seen highly publicized legal battles
seeking to remove restrictions on starvation and dehydration of people
with cognitive disabilities; and

WHEREAS, numerous states have enacted statutes removing restrictions
on the starvation and dehydration of people with cognitive disabilities; and

The New York Daily News reports that the MTA has a secret film file on photographers:

"MTA investigators are keeping a secret database of people stopped and questioned for filming or photographing bridges and tunnels as part of the agency's efforts to thwart terror, the Daily News has learned.

The information is used to try to determine whether shutterbugs are simply putting together vacation slide shows - or gathering intelligence to plot mayhem, law enforcement sources said."

If this is true, this is very disturbing. Both amateur and professional photographers are being turned into modern day boogeypeople. And when a terrorist incident happens, what do the authorities want? They want people to send them their tourist snapshots so that they can try to see if they can spot the bad guys before the act. Argh!!

Some excellent news for students and connoisseurs of photography. The International Center for Photography in New York City and the George Eastman House in Rochester, NY are joining their collections together to create a publicly accessible database of iconic photographs of the past century. From the NYTimes article:

[O]fficials at the Eastman House - the world's oldest photography museum, with more than 400,000 photos and negatives, dating back to the invention of the medium - felt that they needed a New York City presence. And the International Center, a younger institution with a smaller collection, wanted access to Eastman's vast holdings, which include work by Ansel Adams, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen and Lazlo Moholy-Nagy.

... both institutions are at work on an ambitious project to create one of the largest freely accessible databases of masterwork photography anywhere on the Web, a venture that will bring their collections to much greater public notice and provide an immense resource for photography aficionados, both scholars and amateurs.

NPR has an online audio story on "Photographers as Security Concerns:"

Morning Edition, June 16, 2005 · Photographers across the country have complained of getting harassed by law enforcement officials citing security concerns since the September 11 terrorist attacks.