Photogs Of The World: Unite!

Thanks to everyone who made it out in the rain to take pictures! "Small but spirited" is always our favorite description of a protest -- and by our count there were at least twenty people. Starting at Embarcadero, we took a series of trains, stopping first at Powell, then Civic Center, then finally the Castro. It's also so much fun to meet the people behind the blogs, and to get a chance to talk about photography, independent media, technology and constitutional law. Oh, and trade gossip about Matt Gonzalez. We love that guy.

The question of the day was, "Did we win?" By all indications, that answer is "yes," although the difficulty in declaring victory will be in proving the negative -- how will we necessarily know if people are no longer being stopped? We'll give Muni a grace period to get the staff up to date on the policies as outlined by Michael Burns. Our worry is that his response, like all the responses we've heard so far from photographers who've been stopped, is that the events of September 11th seem be the go-to justification for over-aggressive policing, when in fact that event is not relevant to the debate. Why bother protecting the nation if the nation only exists because of our shared respect for the Constitution, Democracy and the rule of law?

We'll post some more of our own pictures after the jump. In the meantime, we'd like to encourage everyone who attended to add their thoughts via trackbacks or comments, with links to their photography. And hopefully the word will get out that if another photographer, journalist or filmmaker is harassed, we now have evidence that they can not be cited or charged.