Photography, besides being subject to or in opposition to the law, shares some common traits with it. Conditionally, both act as homogenization and security mechanisms, explicitly or implicitly imposing a version of reality which tends to become a social norm. Through generalization, they both simplify the natural complexity of things. By attempting to appear impartial, both regularly lay claim to objectivity.

Virtually from the time it first emerged, photography has been employed as a legal tool for identification, surveillance and information gathering. Conversely, it was soon banished from circumstances such as the battlefields of the Great War or judicial hearings. In time, the same practice might come to be judged legal or illegal depending on who was using the photograph or who claimed the right to view it.

Photography, however, besides being subject to or in opposition to the law, shares some common traits with it. Conditionally, both act as homogenization and security mechanisms, explicitly or implicitly imposing a version of reality which tends to become a social norm. Through generalization, they both simplify the natural complexity of things. By attempting to appear impartial, both regularly lay claim to objectivity.

Though many photographic works are influenced by the provisions of the law or illustrate its consequences, few choose to make it their subject, taking a critical stance, satirising its pomposity or proposing a form of action. The three artists presented in Untitled's "Down by law" issue constitute such exceptions, echoing Bertold Brecht's reflection, "Why do we call the river turbulent and not the banks constraining it?"

Christien Meinderstma follows, step by step, the letter of the law and the system that imposes it: she buys a number of confiscated items at a government auction which she groups, arranges and photographs according to the neutral aesthetic of a commercial catalogue. Her aim seems to be to subvert this practice and ultimately reveal the law as something equally absurd as the hypothetical danger from which it attempts to offer protection. In a sense, she is ridiculing the excesses of some anti-terrorist legislation in the collective consciousness. From another viewpoint, she is asking what it means to identify familiar, everyday objects as potential highly dangerous threats. Moving enigmatically between the practice of prohibition and the aesthetic of advertisement, she brings the fear of danger and the desire to consume into unexpected proximity.

Alain Declercq's photographs derive from a stance of civil disobedience by depicting buildings and urban areas whose photography was prohibited following 9/11. His photographs actually testify to the violation, attempting to show that this prohibition is actually a dead letter. His stealthy photographic practice is effectively untraceable, since it rejects widely accepted criteria of contemporary technological image-making - a practice also apparent in the spontaneous, random nature of his compositions. His "camouflaged", minimally informative pinhole photographs constitute an act of opposition to an unintelligible system, similarly "camouflaged" adroitly under the guise of democracy. His stance poses critical questions: what is the purpose of installing the logic of fear in public spaces? Why is the number of official and unofficial surveillance cameras growing, watching over increasingly larger parts of that same public space? How will the iconography of this space evolve in the future, between the hammer and the anvil of surveillance and prohibition?

If picture-taking is considered from some aspects as an ambiguous act situated at the cutting edge of the law, what is the position of the viewer? Samuel Bianchini's interactive installation niform constitutes a reflection on the relationship of the viewer with the limits of the law, represented here by a row of police officers whose figures, at first indiscernible, gradually become clearer as the viewer comes closer. Reversing the usual roles, here it is the viewer-citizen who reveals the identity of the police officers. A peculiar hybrid between abstraction and figurative representation, the installation points out that the law remains invisible until someone approaches its limits, thus creating the conditions of potential threat. The simulated confrontation has neither a vanishing point nor a privileged angle of view, thereby remaining without a specific ideological orientation. The figures of the policemen appear oddly suspended in the same darkness as the viewer, who is moving along the line of the limit imposed by their image without being able to access what is behind it, thereby implying that the actual power behind the limit remains ultimately invisible. In The Viewers at work, Bianchini photographs the viewers of his installation in successive snapshots that display the virtual fluidity of the procession that forms a sort of expanded time, with the viewers now appearing in the photographs as invisible silhouettes. Whereas the viewer of the installation retains a certain amount of initiative, the person who looks at the photographs remains a dispassionate viewer of the progression of this experience.

There is a certain escalation in the sequencing of the three artists: Meindertsma ironically demythologises the forbidden, Declercq disobeys the picture-taking prohibition, while Bianchini creates a field of simulated confrontation. The first two suggest in different ways that some laws of the post 9/11 era aim at disseminating a strategy of fear in the public space, while the third composes a reflection on our relationship with law and power.

However, although the common ground of these works is their stance towards the notion of the law in an era that appears provocatively ominous, there are other readings that should not go unnoticed. Meindertsma implicitly comments on the world of consumerism and its illustrative mechanisms; she also references the world of art with its established auctions of works and objects which become "unapproachable" through their perceived or actual value. Declercq, correspondingly, encourages a personal experience of urban space which, when not fenced by prohibitions, seems to invite an essentially homogenized, stereotyped experience. The interactivity of Bianchini's work in an era in which passivity has become a dominant feature becomes a source of revelation and constitutes a vital reminder of the viewer's and, ultimately, the citizen's role.

Michel de Certeau pointed out that "the law is being relentlessly written on the human body itself" and also that "it is etched on the scrolls made of its subjects' skin". In the same spirit, a question worth considering is the extent to which the law today is being inscribed on the body of photographic and other images, as well as imposed through their deliberate absence.