The photo police

I’m a little behind posting this, but for last month’s issue of Wired Test (an occasional glossy supplement that comes with the magazine), I wrote about a San Francisco photographer who shoots under the name Thomas Hawk. I followed Hawk around for a day, curious about the run-ins (some of which have been documented on BoingBoing) he often has with various police and security guards when he photographs the architecture and street life of the city. Many photographers get hassled in public places, but few know the law and are willing to challenge public and private police like Hawk. The day we went out, he had a fairly typical confrontation with a transit cop, who told him he “needed a permit” to shoot in a public space (which is not, in fact, the case).

Unfortunately Test doesn’t seem to be online, but I’ve uploaded PDF and HTML versions of the story.

Hawk is a remarkably prolific photographer, and it’s definitely worth checking out his Flickr site, where most days he’ll post 10 or more photos (as part of his goal to document San Francisco with 100,000 or more images over the next decades). The shots that he took on the days I followed him around are here and here. He also has a blog, where he talks about his photo adventures, the tech industry, and a lot of other goings on.

Posted at 9:23 pm | Filed under Recent stories, Wired |

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Comments

3 Responses to “The photo police”

  1. Capturing Your World - » The Right to Bear SLRs on December 4th, 2006 4:06 am

    [...] I started out browsing technorati in an attempt to find some new photo blogs. I found Thomas Hawk’s photo blog. The article I read linked to an article written about him in Wired Test. Clicking over I read the short description and clicked to the html version of the article. The Right to Bear SLRs by Evan Ratliff. It’s a good read, I greatly reccomend it for anyone, especially someone shooting, or planning to shoot where the security guards/police roam. [...]

  2. Thomas Hawk's Digital Connection: December 2006 on October 26th, 2007 10:00 am

    [...] a few months back called “The Right to Bear SLRs.” The article was the result of a Wired reporter, Evan Ratliff, following me around San Francisco one afternoon while we took photos.The afternoon was pretty [...]

  3. Magazine Photographer Needed on October 6th, 2009 8:04 pm

    I really enjoy reading The photo police : The Atavist . It’s very interesting. Hope you will post something like this again.


I'm Evan Ratliff, a freelance journalist, founder/editor The Atavist and feature writer for Wired, The New Yorker, National Geographic, and other publications. I'm also the story editor for Pop-Up Magazine, the world's first live magazine.

Email me with story tips, suggestions, complaints.