Overexposed? NYC Weighs Subway Photo Ban

NEW YORK, Feb. 26, 2005 — -- The subway is like the city's subconscious, threading all the neighborhoods together, photographers say.

"The subway becomes sort of the symbol of life -- always moving," says Camillo Vergara, who has spent 33 years photographing the subway.

"The subway was my studio," says Bruce Davidson, another photographer. "It was my blank piece of paper. It was my novel I wanted to write."

But such inspiration soon may be off limits to amateur photographers and may require professionals to go to the trouble of getting special permits. New York City officials are considering a general ban on photography inside the subway system in hopes of making it harder for terrorists to plan an attack.

If that happens, some say an important artistic tradition could be lost -- and for no good reason.

Tradition vs. Terror Fears

Since the 1930s, photographers have used the way the subway gathers and concentrates humanity. Book after book of subway photos have presented studies of personalities caught off guard -- sometimes with deeply meditative faces, lost in mental suspension before they arrive. Davidson's work includes the graffiti-laden subways of the 1980s.

"I think it's just the beginning of repression, of not allowing photographers as artists or as photojournalists to explore our culture and our times," Davidson says. "I think that forcing a law about photography in the subway is running scared."

Below Times Square, amid the tourists always taking snapshots of subways, you might glimpse professional Vergara, who's spent three decades making subway moments permanent. He says a ban due to a post-9/11 climate of suspicion, even if he had a special permit, would be intimidating.

"The suspicion erodes a sense of community, a sense of friendship and a sense of citizenship," Vergara says.

Still, if someone saw Vergara snapping photos up on a train platform -- black knit cap, dark beard -- might they think he was a terrorist and not a professional recording a changing neighborhood?

Impractical?

But a ban, say many security experts, would be impossible to enforce, partly because technology always is racing ahead of the law. For example, as terrorists and just about everyone else knows, many cell phones now have a tiny camera on the back side -- the side away from your face -- so you can appear to be chatting away when in fact you're taking a picture.

ABC consultant Jack Cloonan, a former anti-terrorist officer for the FBI, says a ban would be misleading, offering a false sense or security.

"There's very little that you can do to stop somebody who wants to take a photograph, frankly, of a subway," says Cloonan, who has interrogated al Qaeda members. "The fact of the matter is, that if you went on to a Web site, various Web sites today, you will find at least 11,000 photographs of various subways" around the world.

This story originally was reported Feb. 19, 2005, on "World News Tonight."