"MB" wrote:

Let me be clear that obtrusively photographing someone else’s child is
entirely unacceptable. It is a sad day when the courts have to deal
with a matter this trivial. The photographer should have known
better.


Photographing other people's children has only relatively recently been
considered "entirely unacceptable". When I was a kid in the 1950s and
60s, no-one thought anything of it. Children were just as acceptable a
subject for photography as landscapes, street scenes, wildlife, sports,
architecture etc..

Candid pictures of children were a cornerstone of the portfolios of many
of the great Victorian photographers, for example Frank Meadow Sutcliffe
of Whitby. Presumably, no-one gave a moment's thought to the possibility
that there might have been any suspicious intent, although his pictures
of young boys were criticised by churchmen of the time, not for any
corrupting influence on the subjects but for their potential effect on
young women*.

All this changed significantly, probably from the 1970s onwards with the
emergence of paedophilia as a subject widely discussed by people in
general as well as in the media. Public awareness of paedophilia has
probably reached an all-time high and that shows no signs of going away.

My point is that it wasn't always like that.

I don't think other countries entirely share our very British obsession
with the risk of paedophilia being closely associated with photography.
Perhaps the Greek photographer was slightly bemused by the reaction of
the (presumably British) parents?


*Frank Meadow Sutcliffe's gallery "Children" is online he
http://www.sutcliffe-gallery.co.uk/gallery_194448.html

The pictures were mostly posed, and Sutcliife is known to have given
children some small change in return for allowing him to take
photographs of them.

Presumably you would also consider this to be "entirely unacceptable"?
I know I would - I certainly wouldn't find it in any way acceptable for
a child of mine to be involved in anything like this. But it serves to
illustrate my point that things have changed significantly.