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June 1, 2008
Christopher Deere makes some good points in an op-ed in The Age about the way that the prevalent public fear and moral panic about paedophiles in our culture impacts on photographers working today. This moral panic, for instance, has resulted in me, as a photographer, working in the inner city. It is here that I can find spaces and the freedom provided by big crowds to avoid the paranoia associated with the moral panic. This paranoia represents photographers as folk devils.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, Chinatown, Sydney, 2008
In his op-ed Deere argues that Australians were fairly relaxed about the confluence of sexuality, young girls, ballet and photography in the 1970s, but now things are very different. He describes this change thus:
That was then, this is now. Now, as a balding and bespectacled nearly middle-aged man, I can hardly walk through a public park without looks of guarded alarm and gestures of defensiveness from the mothers of the children playing there. It probably doesn't help that I still carry a camera almost every time I step out of the house. That instrument immediately turns me into a figure of open suspicion in any public place. I can almost hear people thinking, and sometimes aloud: What is he doing here? Why is he carrying a camera? He looks a little odd; I'd better keep my eye on him.
I have sensed this public fear and suspicion in the suburbs of Adelaide around the 1990s when I lived in inner suburb of Parkside and walked the suburban streets with a camera. It was that experience that caused me to return to living in the inner city. This public fear is much worse now.
Deere describes his own reactions as follows:
I suppose that I should be accustomed to it by now, but I'm not. I can still feel a flash of offended realisation when a young woman gathers her children towards her as I pass nearby, or when a security guard in a supermarket follows my movement along the aisle towards the raw sugar. I'm innocent, I sometimes want to say; I'm really not here to cause you any harm. But that would be pointless, and might only make matters worse. Better to simply go about my own business and leave everyone else in peace.
Behind the current moral panic, he says, are real concerns about the safety of children and young women in this technology-heavy age of the internet. He adds that the apprehension is about who has the right to possess a person's image (and, by implication, his identity), and that this has spread to the point where, not so long ago, a suburban council tried to prevent parents from taking photographs of their children at the local pool.
Update: June 2
Frank Furedi is quoted in Lesley Sands' Moral Panics as observing that reaction to events such as the Henson event:
‘reflect far wider concerns about the nature of society today, in circumstances where people sense that things are out of control’. It is when the ‘traditional norms and values no longer appear to have much relevance to people’s lives’, yet there is the belief that there is little with which to replace them, that a very real sense of loss can occur. And set against this background; people’s awareness of this loss of control over their lives, makes them all the more susceptible to moral panics, and perhaps those that would orchestrate them
If we have the politics of fear, then moral panics are usually expressed as expressions of outrage rather than unadulterated fear, and they are framed in terms of a dominant morality threatened by the activities of a stereotyped group. This group, it now seems, now includes photographers. Photography is now being framed as deviant behaviour within todays conservatism of fear.
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Dear Gary: Hello; I am Christopher Deere, and I am very surprised to see a response to my essay appear so quickly in the wider culture. (But I do wish that you had paid a little more attention to the spelling of my name). I wrote the piece more than a month ago, long before the kerfuffle over Bill Henson's photographs had blown in on the wind, and the opinion editor of The Age accepted it immediately (in the middle of April) but needed to wait until enough space was available for its publication. (And, as it now happens, a timely issue with which to associate it.) So thanks for the airplay, although I think that you could have been a little more expansive in your own expression of the issue. I'll be in touch again soon. With my regards, Christopher