Ah, the sheer banditry of photography! More than ever impossible to police, even as the Strathclyde Partnership for Transport announces plans to ban all photography on the Glasgow subway except that for which written permission has been obtained.

I have always felt in good company as I humbly follow in the stealthy footsteps of other outlaws who have defied authority to photograph on the subway, the metro, the tube. Since the arrival of transport modernity, photographers have sought to ride its dark undercurrents – perhaps as an antidote to metropolitan spectacle, whose "falling towers" TS Eliot already found "unreal" in the wasteland of London post first world war, and whose ruin has even greater resonance post 9/11.

US writer Lincoln Kirstein recognised that a "tender cruelty" was prerequisite in photographer Walker Evans' use of a hidden camera to capture the unguarded humanity of passengers on the New York subway in the 1930s. The tenderness and cruelty of Evans' voyeurism and that of his successors are human attributes that should not be confused with the unblinking robotic gaze of corporate surveillance in 2012 London, in a privatised public space that's now transnationally owned, and is no longer answerable to its citizens.

In bad old 1980s New York, Bruce Davidson brazened it out on the subway "with my expensive camera around my neck, in a way that made me feel like a tourist – or a deranged person." There is a kind of in-your-face neighbourliness that is bracingly un-English in Davidson's decision to flash shoot subjects from less genteel stations who, on occasion, interacted with the photographer with a degree of intimacy that required first aid and the replacement of expensive cameras.

'Departure'. Photograph: John Perivolaris

The outlaw status of the photographer underground was well and truly established by the mid-to-late 1990s when Luc Delahaye declared of the photographs which were published under the title L'Autre: "I stole these photographs between 95 and 97 in the Paris metro. 'Stole' because it is against the law [in France] to take them, it's forbidden. The law states that everyone owns their own image. But our image, the worthless alias of ourselves, is everywhere without us knowing it." While many of Evans' photographs showed couples and groups in close proximity, at times interacting with each other; and while Davidson records encounters, at times confrontations, with his subjects, by the 1990s the disengagement of those photographed by Delahaye is complete. Individually framed, they mostly stare into empty space, when their eyes are not entirely shut.

In 2012, we are all photographers. As such, I would encourage readers to band together in groups, such as London tube, on Flickr. Or better yet, form your own cells of underground photographers. Reclaim the visual field from CCTV in the name of a citizenry that is currently seen from above but is not permitted to see from below. And, as you ride the train or bus, lift your cameraphones in greeting as you photograph your fellow passengers, explaining for the umpteenth time that, no, you are neither paedophile nor terrorist, only a photographer and citizen of a visual democracy.

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