[Leica] SFMOMA incident

[kcassidy at asc.upenn.edu (Kyle Cassidy)]

I wasn't going to post this, because I figured someone else would. In the 
206 comments to Hawk's initial blog post (when I went to it) one was from 
someone who proported to be one of the two SFMOMA employees who escorted the 
photographer from the premises. He stated that Mr. Hawk was asked to stop 
photographing ten  times not for taking photos in the atrium, but for what 
the employees believed was perching on a balcony and taking a photograph 
down a staff members amply filled blouse. Whether or not this was actually 
the case (to the untrained eye a large aperture wide angle lens at the 
appropriate angle for capturing a large room can probably look like a 
super-telephoto pointed in a strange direction) it sounds like a reasonable 
starting point for a flare-up. It also appears from reading a few of his 
blog posts that he can be a confrontation waiting for an event. And the fact 
that he continued photographing after being asked to stop ten times suggests 
to me not that the atrium of SFMOMA was in such desperate need of being 
photographed at that exact moment, but that he was looking for a fight. 

There are photographs that it's a journalists duty to go to the mat to get. 
The already well photographed atrium of SFMOMA probably isn't, IMHO, one of 
those. 

kc