Emma sez,
“Snitchtown: the photo essay” is a book of photographs of a (very small) subset of the 4.2 million CCTV in Britain. These have been put together with Cory Doctorow’s essay on ubiquitous CCTV coverage, “Snitchtown” as part of the SoFoBoMo event, in which photographers work to put together a solo project in book form in one month.
I was inspired by some of the things that Cory said at an Open Rights Group debate. Not least of these was the fact that his daughter’s pocket money was tied, in part, to her spotting the CCTV cameras on the way to school. This sounded so damned transgressive, and I realised how much we’ve been trained to pay no attention to the cameras that record our daily lives (I counted 21 on my exit from the tube station this evening alone.)
The book needed some words to explain why I wanted turn the lens back onto the CCTV cameras. I started by using some extracts from “Snitchtown”, along with quotes from the press, and from CCTV manufacturers’ catalogues. I quickly realised that none of these told the story as cogently as the original essay does. The upshot is a creative commons licensed collection of photographs, a creative commons licensed book (PDF only at the present time, but I plan to put it on a print on demand server.)
I’m very new to photography and I know of many people that could have done a much better job, but I wanted to stand under these cameras and document them. Doing so has made me much more aware of just how ubiquitous they are. I hope the photographs will help others to do likewise.
This is, I believe, my absolute favorite CC adaptation of my work to date; in that it’s the first adaptation that I prefer to my original. Great work, Emma!