Some days I can’t think of or find anything worth posting about, and then there are the days like today where I can’t decide which of the very interesting subjects I should be talking about. So you get a little about a couple of different things.

First off, a good friend sent me a link to this article, and a few blogs I read have posted about it as well (no breaking news around here). I believe this event falls outside of the 2000 ban on photographing coffins, because it was not on a military base. Once you understand the lack of a direct law/ban against photographing caskets of soldiers in these circumstances, the most interesting thing about the story to me is the fact that anyone thought they could successfully sue the photographer. Maybe I am missing some legal basis for the suit; anyone with some lawyerin skills want to chime in on this? In my experience many people think there are many more restrictions on photographers than what exist, and they think their rights to their image or images of their property are far greater than what they actually are. (Check out my post on diCorcia from back in 2005.) If you want some specific information on photographers rights a good place to start is the photographers bill of rights and for news coverage of related events the blog PhotoPermit.org, which is also linked above.

The second subject of today’s post is British police seizing Nan Goldin’s Klara and Edda Belly Dancing print. I think this may have gotten more press coverage than normal simply because it was owned by Elton John. You can read more about it here or here. This reminds me of the similar things that have happened to Sally Mann and Jock Sturges, and like everytime something like this happens I am left wondering does/did this happen to Larry Clark, cause his images seem much worse to me than Nan Goldin, Sally Mann, or Jock Sturge’s images ever have. Which I guess illuminates part of the problem, pornography is in the eye of the viewer. If you want to see the image, you can view it here