No Photos Allowed
July 29, 2010 by Jeff Welch
The warning sign as you walk in the Headwaters Heritage Museum, Three Forks, Mont.
What is the point of not allowing photography in an era of social media? Unless it's the Mona Lisa, it would seem that photos can be shared and help promote the place… especially a place in need of promoting like Three Forks.
Meggan breaking the rules upstairs with the coolest part of the museum — a display of 700 different types of barbed wire.
I completely agree, and most museums these days seem to agree as well. I have been pleased to discover on several recent museum visits—in North Carolina, Massachussetts and Manhattan—that this relic of museum administration seems to have been retired. Tell the Headwaters people A) to get with the program and B) that they’ll never be able to stop iPhone photos in any case. And remember that the iPhone photographers are not trying to steal intellectual property (in the usual meaning of that term)—they just want a memento of their visit. Doesn’t cost anybody anything—no harm done.