ABSTRACT
Focusing on photographer-security encounters in the US where there are very few instances in which photography is legally restricted, this chapter analyses the 'war on photography' as a case that illuminates the productivity of suspicious urban encounters. Using online forum and news media descriptions of security-photographer encounters from 2004 to 2013 and interviews conducted with professional photographers found in these forums, it also analyses how urban relations of suspicion, control, and futurity are negotiated in encounters with police and security. It focuses on how the elastic nature of suspicion materialises in security encounters and how this elasticity forms around particular threat imaginations and suspect communities. Security-photography encounters reveal how ephemeral, preemptive security ambitions, which are inherently spectral and speculative, are negotiated through relations of suspicion - much more so than the letter of the law. Suspicion is always undergirded by subjective judgements influenced by the imagined threats of the day.
