Re-photo

I’ve been thinking for a few days about the complaint made by New York City-based photographer Alex Brown aginst the Glasgow artists, Littlewhitehead (Craig Little and Blake Whitehead) who had based an installation on an image by him of a young boy in a Darth Vader mask sitting in a cheap restuarant.

You can see the photograph and a picture of the installation on PDNPulse, which also gives details of the story, though I think I first saw it somewhere else.

My immediate question are where do we stop? And frankly is it a good idea for photographers to raise such questions?

In this particular case much of the impact of both works relies on a heavily trade-marked and copyrighted plastic head dress warn by the child in the picture.  So perhaps Lucasfilm Ltd have a pretty good case for suing the arse off both of these guys?  Then for Alex Brown, perhaps we might ask whether he has a property release for the diner, and there looks like another copyright issue involved in that red shirt, which even has some photographic imagery…

Every time we take a picture, we are copying everything within the frame of our camera. And of course using our skills to organise it into some kind of statement – I don’t in any sense want to belittle the activity of photographers in general or Brown in particular by using the word copying. It’s at the basis of our medium.

And of course the installation is not just a simple transformation into 3D of Brown’s 2D work. There are obvious significant differences, but of course his work acted as an inspiration for the sculptors (though I think it an abuse of language to call it plagiarism.) Perhaps too we need to remember the dictum that is still at the base of our copyright laws “there is no copyright in ideas, only in their creative expression” even if some court decisions appear to contradict this.

It’s an area where photographers very much live in glasshouses, and if every artist or photographer who had inspired some of my pictures were to form a line outside my house it would stretch a very long way. And near the head of the queue would be guys like the two Henris (Matisse & Cartier-Bresson) and Walker Evans.

But back to the Darth Vader image; since Littlewhitehead were deliberately making use of a particular image, I would have assumed that they would have acknowledged it when exhibiting their work and in their documentation. And that they would have carried out sufficient research to include the name of the photographer (it wouldn’t have taken much at all.)

But really that’s all.  If I put an image of – for example – the Lloyd’s of London building on line, I don’t inform Richard Rogers, ask his permission or expect him to demand payment. Though I rather hope if he happens to see it he will like it. And if someone ever goes to the trouble of creating an installation based on one of my images, I’d feel flattered.

And my thanks to Charles Caleb Colton for the title to this piece!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 9th, 2010 at 02:50 pm and is filed under Photo Issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.