Interviewing Carlos Miller

I interviewed Carlos Miller via Facebook a couple weeks back for an assignment for my internship. This dude is big, muscly, and tan but he is also one of the forerunners in the photographer's rights movement. As a photographer myself, knowing your rights to photograph public property is extremely important. Cops often make up their own rules or harass people with cameras when they are free to take pictures of things like subway systems, car accidents, and police officers themselves. Miller writes non-fiction articles about different injustices to photojournalists and videographers because he himself was arrested twice for photographing police and he won both cases against the police without a lawyer. That is how integrated digital media, public property, and the first amendment all are. It's so important to be aware of your rights especially if you plan on taking pictures or video of any of the occupy protests. Even the activists have turned ugly against media journalists. There are countless videos of harmless photographer's being harassed, attacked, and threatened by the "peaceful" sit-inners. As long as it's a public space, you can shoot whatever you'd like (with a camera of course, not a gun) and as Carlos Miller coined, "Photography is not a crime".