"Say Cheese, for Airport Insecurity and for Art"

Wednesday, November 6, 2002

Say Cheese, for Airport Insecurity and for Art
By SARAH BOXER
The New York (NY) Times


Surely this will be a fleeting moment in the history of photography and,
when things get sorted out, in the history of airport security too. A
year ago a Canadian artist named Isabelle Devos discovered that certain
camera-toting tourists going through airport security after Sept. 11
were being asked, as she said, to take a photograph to prove that their
camera was not a security risk.

Ms. Devos, who lives in Sackville, New Brunswick, wanted those pictures.
She spread the word in newspapers and magazines, on Web sites and Web
'zines, by word of mouth and by radio. Whenever she flew, she would
leave a stack of her business cards next to the security station along
with a plea: "Send me your security photos, no matter how boring and bad
you might think they are!"

Ms. Devos, who has "been involved in performance art of a certain
nature," like moving rocks in the landscape to make them look more
orderly, said that when it came to photography she liked "closed-in
parameters." That is, she likes to set limits and create assignments for
herself: "only photograph within a 50-foot diameter around oneself or
"only photograph circular things."

The security scramble that followed Sept. 11 presented Ms. Devos with a
perfectly parameterized photo op. If you have only seconds to consider
the composition and subject and you're being watched by guards and
anxious tourists who think your camera might explode, what kind of
picture will you take?

Ms. Devos calls her venture the Insecurities Project because the
pictures she sought were taken "in security" and because of the "new
sense of insecurity in North America."

Soon the pictures started rolling in. She got one image of two grinning
tourists in New York and one of a woman in the Cincinnati airport
absorbed in her TV Guide. In the Greater Moncton International Airport
in New Brunswick, Canada, she got a photograph of a line of travelers
getting their luggage examined and, in the foreground, a girl's
out-of-focus face turning to gaze back at the camera. One picture showed
a security guard at the Charlottetown Airport on Prince Edward Island
demonstrating how to hold your arms out for a pat-down: she looked like
a somnambulist. There was a shot of an X-ray machine in Halifax, Nova
Scotia. A picture of the Munich airport security zone. A blurry image,
taken in the Vancouver International Airport, of a woven floor mat and a
scratched-up table leg. An even blurrier picture of someone's orange
vest, shot at point-blank range in Halifax.

Ms. Devos hoped to find patterns, like similarities in airport décor. A
lot of airport interiors have gray and pink color schemes, she observed.
She expected to see pictures of security guards doing their jobs, and
she looked forward to getting lots of pictures of "people with tension
discernible on their faces." She hoped for voyeur and "trapped traveler
scenarios." Her plan was to keep contributors informed on her Web site,
www.insecuritiesproject.com, and then, when she had accumulated 50
photographs or so, to have an exhibition of 3-by-4-foot blowups of some
of the photographs with text addressing broad cultural and social
patterns.

Then airport security stepped in.

What was the problem? It was not that Ms. Devos had photographed airport
screening machines and guards or that she was being irreverent about
security. The problem, it turned out, was with the screeners. The
practice of making tourists take snapshots to prove their cameras aren't
weapons goes against American and Canadian policy.

In Canada screeners can make you turn on electronic devices, like
cellphones, laptop computers and digital cameras, and they might make
you put your camera and film through the X-ray machines, said Tony Hahn,
a communications advisor at Transport Canada, which regulates airline
policy, but "they never would ask you to take a picture." Well, maybe
not never. "We're aware that this happens," Mr. Hahn said. But that is
just "the individual screener being overzealous." By the end of the
year, he said, it should all be sorted out. The Canadian government will
take over all airline security.

It's the same story in the United States. According to national
guidelines, "a screener cannot ask you to take a photograph to prove
it's a camera," said Dave Steigman, a spokesman for the Transportation
Security Administration. The fact that some screeners do, he said,
simply indicates that security is a little chaotic right now, a mishmash
of public and private screeners. But by Nov. 19, Mr. Steigman said, all
will be sorted out. The Transportation Security Administration expects
to have 32,000 national screeners at 429 different airports for all
scheduled passenger airlines in the United States. Then, Mr. Steigman
said, you will see less and less of people taking pictures at security
checkpoints.

"Bad news that it will no longer be policy to check some cameras by
asking to take a photograph," Ms. Devos said. "I am disappointed that I
didn't have hundreds or even 50 photos coming in." But she said that the
19 pictures she did get were a "small window of documentation of a tense
period of time" and "a good cross section of what it is people decided
to take a snap of in that minute time frame."

The Insecurities Project yielded one big surprise. "I didn't expect that
most of the images would be people smiling at the photographer,
seemingly happy," she said. What is that about? "Perhaps it is because
they wish to make the photo worth the price of processing or they are
happy to be going through security, or they are covering up their stress
in the situation." She added, "For some reason, smiling and photos being
taken go hand in hand."

Maybe more insecurity photos will come. Ms. Devos is still hopeful that
the phasing-out of "the camera thing" will be gradual. She plans to wait
until early January to decide what the exhibition will look like. She
will apply and arrange for exhibition spaces in North America. (So far
she has been offered an exhibition by a gallery in Anchorage.) And who
knows? Maybe one day airport security will once again be as wild and
woolly as it was right after Sept. 11. If not, Ms. Devos said: "I don't
mind the fleeting quality to it. After all, photography is so fleeting."


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