Another Ugly Neumos Incident
Last night I was walking by Neumos with a friend, and we stopped — on the sidewalk — to look at/listen to whoever was playing via an open door. (Neumos is notoriously hot, and they keep the Pike Street door open during summer events.)
Being a street photographer, I had my camera with me. I raised it to shoot a few frames through the door. Shooting through a door while retaining some of the door’s border — like the wall for instance — can frame a subject beautifully. And there was some real dancing going on in there.
Ok, so let’s compose and fire the shutter. But wait! There’s a hand coming toward me… now it’s filling my frame, and now it’s actually pushing the lens, the camera, and my head back.
Turns out some Neumos security guy is in my face telling me I can’t shoot into the club through the open door*.
Angrily.
As my friend pulled me down the sidewalk away from Neumos, I traded some words with him and he came probably twenty feet onto the sidewalk to roid-rage at me. He thought better of it when he realized he was acting pretty aggressively, and he lumbered back into the Neumos doorway to scowl at my friend and I as we continued on.
What’s with Neumos and testosterone lately? Is Neumos a sanity-free zone now? What happened? After Wolf Parade there next month, I’ll be staying away from that place.
* it’s legal to photograph, videotape and report on anyone or anything you can see from any public place, as long as the photographed subject(s) cannot claim a reasonable expectation of privacy, which in this case is moot because it was a stage performance.
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That night is an all women’s night and it is stated all around the club there is no cameras allowed. Since you weren’t coming to the event, you would have had no way to know about that. They are very specific and adamant about it. Security has no idea who you are so they are going to make sure that the photograph is not taken. I’m sorry you felt they were being over aggressive in making sure it didn’t happen. We pride our security on being careful of how they handle the situations and I feel they do a really good job inside the club.
That’s fine. But you can’t stop people from taking photos from public property. If you want privacy, *close the door*.
Otherwise it’s completely legal, and you or your employees are simply not within their rights to stop it. Pretty simple stuff really.
“In the United States, anything visible (”in plain view”) from a public area can be legally photographed. This includes buildings and facilities, people, signage, notices and images. It is not uncommon for security personnel to use intimidation or other tactics to attempt to stop the photographer from photographing their facilities (trying to prevent, e.g., industrial espionage); however, there is no legal precedent to prevent the photographer so long as the image being photographed is in plain view from a public area.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_photography#Legal_considerations
Matt — I’m behind you on both intense security at Neumo’s (the Crocodile as well). 100% on the taking photos from public places — there’s all kinds of court cases, supreme court rulings that completely uphold this. Pretty much as long as you yourself are in public and you can see what’s going on from the public position — you can take pictures of whatever you want. There’s shit backing this up throughout the history of the U.S. The courts never, ever side with anything other than the “public view” theory…
Neumo’s security was definitely overstepping by attempting to enforce the night’s in-club camera policy on a public sidewalk. You were definitely within your rights… but what happened isn’t very surprising.