Buffalo Rising Online

Jun 21st, 7:27am By STEEL

There is a small group of amateur photographers documenting Buffalo inside and out. They rove the city streets focusing their lenses on the good the bad and the ugly. To get their images they hunt out unusual angles often inside abandoned buildings, on overpasses, or on the top floor of parking decks among other out of the way vantage points. They share much of their work on web-folio sites filed with gorgeous often haunting Buffalo images. They also share their thoughts on the city at web-forum sites such as skyscrapercity.com. Pictures are also shared on these forums in addition to endless conversation about Buffalo (and other places across the globe). The conversation can be wide ranging including mindless banter, development news, urbanism, and discussions on society.

One such recent discussion has been about the heavy-handed security these photo enthusiasts often encounter as they point and shoot. It is not uncommon to be flagged down by a security guard if you aim your lens at a prominent landmark. I have experienced this myself on several occasions. Often, with a simple explanation accompanied by a friendly smile the tension will drop and you can continue on. But, in today's terrorism conscious world, people are less trusting and perhaps justifiably. Too often it seems security is done without any level of common sense. Are we taking our security to the level of paranoia?

Here are a few excepts from the conversation (I have used forum screen names here):

SpartaRoolz opened the conversation with this: ... Without fail tryin to take photos from a parking ramp always causes a problem. Always. I was on the one by M&T last night and the security guard obviously freaked out. Said it was privately owned. "who owns it?" The city does was the reply. .... I walked with him downstairs to talk to the police about it. 3 police officers came to talk to me about how i need my own insurance to be on there in case anything happens ($1,000,000 worth) and i need to talk to the owner to get permission. Couldn't produce a number for me to call the "owner" and since 911 they have been having problems with people taking photographs of the city from parking ramps. LIKE THAT IS A PROBLEM???? I wasn't making a scene, I wasn't suspicious, I wasn't taking terrorist shots. ...

jsk193 added this bit of irony: Its interesting that there is an increased forbidance of taking urban photos yet at the same time Google seems to have photos of just about every street in Greater Buffalo easily [sic] acessble to anyone.

Frequent BRO writer WestSideJohn adds: It's a problem and it's getting worse all the time. Last summer I was escorted off the Peace Bridge and into the Customs office for taking pictures, even though I'd asked permission beforehand...

...If someone says "don't take pictures here" I'll say thank you and leave. But in this day of cell-phone cameras and miniature point and shoots, it doesn't make much sense to focus only on people who happen to have a large camera. I've been turned away from Thursday in the Square because of my camera, while people in the crowd hold up their cell phones to take photos of the band.

Is this type of security is useful or are we focussing our energy on phantoms. We may never know.

Check out more of the amazing photography these guys have been producing )more and more on the sly)

SpartaRoolz http://nmophotography.zenfolio.com/ BuffCity http://nmophotography.zenfolio.com/ (note -Images shown here are by BuffCity AKA Nathan Farnsworth. He has shared many of his images with BRO. We thank him for his generosity)