A few weeks ago John Mattison was snapping photos on an el platform when a train conductor told him to stop. “The conductor told me it’s illegal to take pictures on CTA property,” says Mattison, a 31-year-old north-side resident. “I didn’t know that. I bet a lot of people don’t know that. I’m sure it’s going to be a big surprise to a lot of tourists. This is one of those incredibly ridiculous rules that exist for no good reason.”
His first confrontation with the CTA was on May 24. “I was on the el–the Brown Line–taking pictures of people,” he says. “It was just a people-on-a-train environment–pictures of people in the morning, to be specific. I was doing a Sunday-morning commute–just the feel of it. I had my tripod with me. I set it up on the train. I was trying new techniques with a larger camera.”
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The train pulled out. A moment later a guard approached him on the platform. “That driver definitely must have called someone, because this guard came up out of nowhere and said, ‘You have to stop taking pictures,’” says Mattison. “I said, ‘Why do you have to stop me?’ He said, ‘It’s against the law.’ I wasn’t sure what he was talking about. How can shooting pictures on a el platform be against the law? Hundreds of tourists do it every day. I just finished off my roll and left.”
By this point the guard was standing directly over Mattison. “I said, ‘Can’t you cut me some slack?’” Mattison says. “He said, ‘No, this is the law.’ I’m thinking, ‘This is crazy.’ Obviously, it’s not crowded. I’m not in anyone’s way. I’m not bothering anyone–I’m taking pictures of an exit sign. What’s it gonna do? I thought, ‘This is crazy, but he might arrest me.’”
As for people who are just taking snapshots, Gaffney says, “it’s usually not an issue. But obviously we don’t want people impeding the flow of traffic or getting in the way. We don’t want them putting their equipment on the platform. And since September 11 we’ve asked our employees to be more vigilant in reporting things that are unusual, and sometimes they have reported people who are taking photos. A lot of times there are people who are rail fans or transit buffs who come from other cities, and they’re going all over the place snapping photos of things that aren’t of interest to the typical person who comes to our station. In that case, they’re sometimes asked to identify themselves or cease taking pictures.”
The brief–filed by Major League Baseball, the National Hockey League, the National Basketball Association, and the National Football League, as well as U.S. Cellular Field and the United Center–is the latest development in a fight that began about 6:30 PM on December 27, 2000. According to Weinberg, that’s when three United Center security guards put him in a headlock, threw him to the ground, cuffed his hands behind his back, led him into the arena, held him in a room with his hands chained to a wall, and called the police to have him arrested.
The first judge to hear the case ruled for the city. Weinberg appealed, and last November he won a reversal from a three-member panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.
