The Online Photographer

This picture of actor Steve McQueen eating a doughnut has gotten English actress Claire Forlani in trouble.

Forlani, most recently best known for playing Dr. Peyton Driscoll on the TV show "CSI: New York," bought the William Claxton print three years ago as a birthday present for Dougray Scott, who is now her husband. This past July, for reasons that are not entirely clear, she sent out a "mass email" claiming that the dealer who had sold her the print, Paul Rusconi, was selling forged materials and overcharging for them (I guess those two things do tend to go together—if you believe the first to be true, then the second would follow).

In retaliation, Rusconi is suing the actress for defamation. According to papers acquired by the gossip show "TMZ," Rusconi believes that "only a very large damages judgment can begin to remedy" the grievous harm she has done to his reputation—$25 million being a sum that would do nicely, according Courthouse News Service.

Rusconi claims the Claxton print, one of only 15 prints made of the picture by the photographer, is genuine.

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According to an article by Rene Stutzman that appeared in The Orlando Sentinel and other Florida newspapers, the dispute is "not uncommon"—Valeria Gentile and Erwin Cajamarca, a married couple who are divorcing, are fighting over the pornographic pictures that Mr. Cajamarca took of Ms. Gentile while they were married. Quoth her lawyer, "she never agreed for the photos to be seen by anyone but her husband."

Kinda funny...except, of course, if it happens to you.

It also sounds like more of a moral issue to me than a legal one. Is all fair in love and war? Should all private marital pics be considered marital property with either party reserving the right to destroy them? Should ditched 'n' dissed males still be expected to be gentlemen, even though people on the splits are often more "into" revenge than they ever were into being happily paired?

"Sometimes," says divorce attorney Mitchel B. Krause, "ownership of these kinds of photos is one of the most contentious issues facing a divorcing couple." I'll bet.

Mike
(Thanks to Taran Morgan)

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While I was away, the Times' Lens blog posted Edgar Martin's comments in defense of himself. The Times editors' introduction betrays the sharpness of the burned:

And some of the commenters aren't having much of his explanations, either (this is part of a comment by "Ben"):

It's all in the context, isn't it? If it had been presented as "art photography," there's absolutely not a thing wrong with anything Edgar Martins has done. Presented as documentary and then lied about, it's flat unacceptable.

Here's Edgar's apologia (I didn't read it).

Kudos again to Adam Gurno, "Unixrat" on Metafilter, who was the one who first got wise to the chicanery.

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Featured Comment by Mike C.: "A misrepresentation is a misrepresentation, sure enough, but some arguments over 'representation' have been going on for some while:

Just then my eye was caught by an unframed canvas standing on a shelf above Jacqueline's head and to the right. It was a portrait of a girl—Jacqueline, I would have said—in tones of green and black and white. She was shown in profile, looking off to the left, and Picasso had given the face a mildly geometrical stylization built up of triangular forms which emphasized the linear treatment but at the same time preserved the likeness. I pointed to the painting. 'How would you explain to a person whose training made him look on that as deformation, rather than formation, why you had done it that way?' I asked him.

'Let me tell you a story,' Picasso said. 'Right after the Liberation, lots of GIs came to my studio in Paris. I would show them my work, and some of them understood and admired more than others. Almost all of them, though, before they left, would show me pictures of their wives or girl friends. One day one of them who had made some kind of remark, as I showed him one of my paintings, about how 'It doesn't really look like that, though,' got to talking about his wife and he pulled out a tiny passport-size picture of her to show me. I said to him, "But she's so tiny, your wife. I didn't realize from what you said that she was so small." He looked at me very seriously. "Oh, she's not really so small," he said. "It's just that this is a very small photograph." '

—Picasso, interviewed in The Atlantic, July 1957

"Just sayin'...."

Featured Comment by Puplet: "[Martins' apologia is] almost a success: if he'd written a few hundred words more, I'd have lost the will to live entirely and would have agreed with anything he wanted to say, just to make him stop...."

Featured Comment by Robert Noble: "I thought one of the more astute comments in the zillion-word metafilter thread that started all this was by 'yoink,' in response to those who are flogging the New York Times for sleeping in the job.

"In light of the multiple earlier books and gallery shows in which Martins also lied about not digitally manipulating his photographs, Yoink wrote (emphasis added):

By John Oates, The Register (U.K.)

The Metropolitan Police has issued guidance to its officers to remind them that using a camera in public is not in itself a terrorist offence.

There has been increasing concern in recent months that police have been over-using terrorism laws and public order legislation to harass professional and amateur photographers. The issue was raised in Parliament and the Home Office agreed to look at the rules.

The guidance reminds officers that the public do not need a licence to take photographs in the street and the police have no power to stop people taking pictures of anything they like....

READ ON at theregister.co.uk

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I've got no beef against America's Best Newspaper, The New York Times (which I sometimes also call "the world's best photography magazine" because its photography content is so much better than what you find in most photo mags)—but, according to Editor & Publisher, it appears that they're the latest victim of getting burned by an unscrupulous photographer.

It's curious—one of the traditional roles of the print media was to act as a gadfly to business and government and keep 'em honest, look into their claims and behavior and so forth and check to see if they were all on the up-and-up. So, now, has it fallen to blogosphere to play the very same role vis-a-vis the traditional media itself? Or am I reading way too much into this?

(I'm not being grandiose, because I don't do much original reporting here on this blog. Original opinion is the best I can claim. I mean the Blogosphere, capital B, meaning, other people who know more than I.)

At any rate, it seems the paper commissioned the distinguished Portuguese photographer Edgar Martins to travel the U.S. photographing abandoned construction projects for an article in the Magazine. Pretty obvious what they expected, since a sentence near the start of the article began, "Martins, who creates his images with long exposures but without digital manipulation, traveled...." A commenter at metafilter named unixrat (who turns out to be Adam Gurno of Rosemount, Minnesota—there's an audio interview with him on Minnesota Public Radio News) got suspicious, and compared one of the pictures with a straight left-to-right flip, proving the photo was a mirror composite with a few details changed to disguise the fact. Curiously, a lot of the discussion at metafilter addressed people who "just couldn't see" how the flip proved the image was fake. I'm betting our readers won't have that problem.

In any event, the Times agreed. The slideshow has since been replaced by a terse note that says, "The pictures in this feature were removed after questions were raised about whether they had been digitally altered."

It can happen to the best.

Mike
(Thanks to els and Andy Adams)

UPDATE: There is now a fuller explanation on the Times site, at the link called "since been replaced" above:

Note the phrase "...most of the images...."

(Thanks to our reader JR for pointing this out to me. —Ed.)

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Featured Comment by John A. Stovall: "It pales when compared to this."

Featured Comment by Stan B.: I'll be the first to admit I'm not very good at spotting such things—but this was not some flash news item. These days, photographic images need to be meticulously vetted. And if the regular photo editor ain't up to task, perhaps a new position needs to be created and/or utilized—an Image Authenticity Editor, if you will.

"And if Mr. Martins is, in fact, guilty—what is the mindset of someone making a career of the very thing he so publicly goes out of his way to divorce himself from?"

Mike replies: I emailed Edgar asking if he'd like to tell his side of the story. I'll let you know if I hear back.

UPDATE 9 July: I received the same reply from Edgar that the Times published on its Lens blog. He says he's traveling and will have a statement when he gets back and can review the discussion. (I think I might extend that trip if I were him....)

This is all over the web, but that's no excuse not to include it here...the original, as far as I can tell, came from kheirkhah.ir, which in turn apparently took it from a Farsi-language newspaper.

Can bad Photoshop be a sign of moral turpitude? Ahmadinejad was apparently "chosen" to win the "democratic" election by the Ayatollah who functions as the "Supreme Ruler" of Iran—whose minions, in this case, are not above not-so-subtly enhancing the approved selection's crowd support. Worse, reports are filtering out of Iran that this "Supreme Ruler"—who is, remember, a religious leader—is considering the use of massive violence to put down the street protests.

That has to be the most disgusting thing I've heard in a long time—and it's had lots of competition.

Various and sundry American Christian leaders periodically disgrace themselves with hypocrisy and bad behavior (a spectacle I confess I find intermittently entertaining, in the aggregate although certainly not in all particulars), but at least they're not in any position to order the wholesale slaughter of their own flocks.

For a bracingly balancing view of Iran and its people, I recommend Rick Steves' "Iran: Yesterday and Today." It's not the whole story either (being sanitized and Iranian-government-approved, as Rick explains)—it's just a side we see less often.

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Here's another one of those power-of-the-internet stories that are either delightful or creepy—I can never quite decide which. Maybe both.

Seems a former television anchorwoman in Missouri named Danielle Smith has a blog about being a mom. It's called Extraordinary Mommy. On her blog, she often posts family pictures, which included this family portrait:

It was taken by a photographer friend of hers named Gina Kelly. The Smith family used the shot as their Christmas card.

I guess Mr. Smith does look vaguely Eastern European, huh?

So recently, Danielle joined Facebook, and got back in touch with an old college friend. Before long, he sent her a message saying he'd just seen a picture. In the window of a grocery story. In Prague, in the Czech Republic.

Of Danielle and her family.

So of course he took a picture of it with his cell phone and sent it to her.

And, of course, she blogged about it...and the story went viral, on Duggit and Redaboutit and whatever. So then she started getting comments from people...most of which were friendly, from people who thought it was cool, or who were outraged on her and her family's behalf, or who'd had similar experiences, or who had photographic or copyright information or legal advice for her. As you might expect.

"However, quite a few [comments] were horrendous and nasty. I’ve been called names I hadn’t heard in years," she writes. "Seriously?...You just felt compelled to tell me my husband is the unluckiest guy in the world because he got ’stuck’ with me? Or that he is ugly? Or something even more hideous about my kids? You think I’m a terrible mom for posting family pictures? I’m a moron for not knowing this could happen?"

Personally, I guess I don't know where to come down on the delightful/creepy spectrum. It's pretty amazing, not only that the picture made it from Missouri to to the Czech Republic, but that it also made it back again.

The picture in the grocery store window, of course, is what stock photography is for. The Czech grocer probably just didn't want to pay whatever small fee he might have had to pay to license a stock picture (or didn't know that's what he should have done). If it were me, though, I just might be complimented, if I were in Danielle's position. I might request that the grocer pay a couple of hundred dollars in good faith to the photographer, and then let him keep the picture up.

Of course people do feel differently when they have small children, and I understand that too.

But the one thing about the story I'm certain of is that perfect strangers have no cause to be rude in their comments to Danielle. People in general really do need to learn to be polite, civil, and considerate on the internet, as well as everywhere else. Not just because they might get in trouble for doing the wrong thing, but because being courteous is the right thing.

The e-world, not to mention the real world, is getting more crowded all the time, and the less we feel like being polite to each other, the more important it's going to be for all of us to act that way.

Mike
(Thanks to Vance Cowan)

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The "most viewed photo" on Yahoo! is this mug shot recently released by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation showing former music producer Phil Spector, who is currently serving a minimum of 19 years in prison for murdering a young woman he enticed to his home. (Evidently they don't let him wear his wigs in the penitentiary.) He apparently committed the crime for no other reason than a thrill. Taken June 5th.

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Rudy Mancuso, The Shot Heard 'Round the World

"The Man Who Shot 'the Shot Heard 'Round the World,'" by Joshua Prager of The Wall Street Journal, is a touching story. Photographer Rudy Mancuso, who took a famous baseball photograph, lost track of his negative and never got credit for his picture over the years, only to have both restored to him at the very end of his life. A good short read and a nice tale of justice and vindication for one photographer.

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Featured Comment by Joshua Prager: "Hello. A friend just alerted me to your blog post about my article. Thank you!

"I read your reader comments and thought I could help answer some of the questions. First, the ball is indeed visible. It is about half-way between home plate and third base, just a few feet in fair play. (I have the ball circled in my book.) Second, I agree that it is by no means baseball's greatest photograph. What I wrote is that it is arguably baseball's most famous photo and that the moment it preserved was baseball's greatest. Third, the newspapers did not at first run the photograph. But after it appeared in the New York Giants yearbook and those ads, it gained steam and began popping up in countless written accounts of the game. And finally, I have a chapter in my book (Chapter 17) describing how the baseball writers scrounged about for ways to properly describe the game and its meaning. In this chapter I discuss how it came to be called 'The shot heard round the world.'

"P.S. I have a great respect for photography. Your readers might be interested to know that I was the reporter who in 2006 identified the only anonymous winner in the history of the Pulitzer Prize—the Iranian photographer Jahangir Razmi. That article is on my website."

Featured Comment by William Barnett-Lewis: "Thank you for the link. It's good to know that sometimes things can end right, at least.

"That image is a good, evocative image but I'd suggest reading this for the story of what I consider the greatest baseball photograph of them all."

Photo: Liu Tao / Imaginechina via Zuma Press

This is a picture from MSNBC's "The Week in Pictures" from April 30–May 7. Here's the title and caption in full:

What's interesting to me is that this is about the third such picture I've seen, and in each case someone was either writing or commenting about the nefarious photographers who "lay in wait" rather than warn pedestrians.

It's always an interesting premise...what the photographer "should have done" in various scenarios, in the mind of the average viewer. I used to show a picture to my students of a woman falling to her death from a burning building, and class after class would decry the photographer for not "doing something." Never mind that the shot was most probably taken with a telephoto from many meters away (and quite possibly from behind a police line), and the photographer only had seconds to react. He was probably very lucky to get a shot off, never mind running over and...what? Breaking her fall with his body? It's not like you're Superman and you could catch her in your arms, much as you might wish you could.

The question with the bike rider comes down to: if you knew there was a pothole there, would you stay there in the rain to warn everybody who might come along—even if you didn't have a camera? Because if the photographer doesn't have a camera, he would most likely have moved on, and the bicyclist would be no more protected. Conversely, if the photographer should stay there and warn anyone who comes along, then anyone who knows about the pothole is ethically lacking if they also don't stay to warn anyone who might come along. Interesting riddle, like an ethical Möbius strip.

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Featured Comment by Lynn_B: "It's good to see some debate about ethics. What photographs like this also reveals are the untested assumptions almost everyone makes about the hidden narrative surrounding a photograph. In this case we don't know if the photographer was aware of the pothole (could have been a grab shot) or even aware of the approaching cyclist. There is an growing tendency in recent times to judge photographers more on untested assumptions and on community fears resulting from media hysteria, than on the evidence. So photographers snapping public landmarks are questioned about terrorism, snapping children are suspect paedophiles, and snapping unfortunate cyclists are suspect sociopaths. The best defence is probably to identify the assumed narrative and challenge it."

Featured [partial] Comment by Mikal W. Grass: "...Just maybe the photographer was not waiting for the cyclist to take a spill, but was merely photographing something that he may not have seen before: a cyclist holding an umbrella while riding a bicycle."

Featured [partial] Comment by David Fultz: "What’s interesting about this is the assumption that the photograph depicts a unique occurrence rather than the unique view of a common occurrence. Hmm."

Featured Comment by JohnL: "And no-one has yet suggested the photographer and cyclist may be working together to get this shot!"

Featured [partial] Comment by Ted Johnson: "The real question is: If a bicyclist falls due to a pothole and no one is around to photograph it, does he/she end up with road rash?"

ADDENDUM:

""I just knew [sic] that the city government has paved the pit, and without my pictures, the pit would not be noticed by the government, and there would perhaps be more people falling over." —Liu Tao (the pictures were allegedly taken in Xiamen City and were apparently first published in the Beijing Youth Daily. —MJ)

One of the staples of the magazine writing game is the trend article. Its main ingredient is the expert prediction. It's a tried-and-true formula: take a hypothesis about the future of X industry or Y cultural/social/political phenomenon and round up a bunch of experts and analysts to give you quotes that support it. If it's a counter-intuitive—or better yet, shocking—hypothesis, so much the better: your editor will go for it like a crack addict to his pipe. I've done plenty of these myself, but I've always wondered what kind of accuracy rate these articles, and especially the "expert" prognostications they depend on, would prove to have if anyone went back and checked them. In fact, I've often thought of pitching an article that examines that very question to some editor somewhere, but, like so many things, this item on my to-do list remains undone. I have a suspicion what the results would be, though, and I think they might undermine an entire genre of magazine journalism (not to mention a whole ecosystem of market research analysts, social scientists, and other flavors of pundit).

This all came back to mind recently when a friend asked me to help him research a book about Nikon. In the course of that research, I turned up an article from the February 29, 1992 issue of The Economist, written in that magazine's amusingly and inimitably self-assured voice. Some highlights:

"Now that microchip technology has made it possible for even the most hamfisted holiday maker to take photos like the best professional, consumers suddenly seem bored by the whole idea. This is proving a disaster for Japan's camera makers...

"Once lauded and feared as the most ruthless of Japanese exporters, the country's camera makers swept competitors aside by dazzling consumers with clever new technologies. Now it seems to be their turn to be swept aside...

"[Some legal setbacks the article details] will [not] cost the camera companies as much as their uncharacteristic mistake in misreading recent trends in the photography market. The quickest to exploit, and encourage, these trends has been Fuji Photo Film. With a 70% share of the Japanese market for film and second worldwide only to Eastman Kodak, Fuji has attacked the camera market with gusto, catching traditional camera makers off guard with a range of startlingly successful disposable cameras...

"[T]hose still buying cameras could not care less about grain size, depth-of-field, 1/f numbers and other photo-babble. All most consumers want is convenience, at rock-bottom prices. The high-tech skills carefully acquired over decades by Japanese camera makers are having to be redeployed to be worth anything...

"Within five years, many industry analysts reckon, there will be only one camera company left in Japan: Fuji, creator of the disposable camera. Other camera makers will either have joined the electronics industry or been tossed on the corporate scrap heap, where German and American camera makers ended their life 20 years ago."

Well, as we know, disposable cameras did not take over the world, and Fuji was not the last camera maker standing. In fact, those camera companies that The Economist spotted teetering on the brink of the scrap heap shipped nearly 120 million quite definitely non-disposable digital cameras in 2008, according to the Camera and Imaging Products Association. Almost 9.7 million of those were DSLRs, which is at least 2 million more units than were sold in 1981 when film SLR sales peaked at somewhere between 6 and 7.5 million, depending on your source. And photo-babble is, on my reading of the evidence, as popular as ever. (Lucky for us, eh Mike?)

This little tidbit proves nothing, of course, but I found it amusing, as well as a poignant commentary on the "uncharacteristic misreading of trends" (currently there are six digital cameras in my apartment, ranging from pocket-sized Fujis and Canons to DSLRs from Olympus, Pentax, and Nikon). I've got to believe this is one case where a writer for The Economist is glad his magazine doesn't give bylines.

But it also got me thinking, what if it had actually worked out that way? What an odd, not to mention disposable, future that would have been. I wonder how many people reading that article believed it was describing their true fate.

Eamon

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There's a new version of an old scam going around—this time targeting artists and photographers.

First, a "buyer" contacts you requesting to buy a particular print or artwork—sometimes even linking to your web page with the print that's being requested. Then they tell you that a check is on the way—one that includes shipping costs—but that you need to use their (the buyer's) preferred shipping company. You're requested to deposit the check and, on the same day, make a Western Union payment to the shipping company. (In the case we know about, the alleged company was called "fedral shipping." Sure sounds legit, huh?)

Naturally, what happens then is that the check bounces and you can't get the "shipping" money back.

This is an old scam, common enough on Ebay and Craig's List. What's new is that they're now targeting artists and photographers who have online stores. And, sadly, although I know most of you will already be inoculated against such a ploy, I can just picture some struggling artist being so pleased to finally make a big sale of work that they allow themselves to be blinded by hopefulness.

Beware.

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It's late as I write this and I want to get back to "regular programming" tomorrow (Ctein has a post awaiting publication, and I'd like to say more about Wood, Water, and Light by Mendlowitz and White), so just a few final final recommendations, after three days of vigorous chewing on the issue of copyright.

The issues involved in presenting work and protecting it are somewhat at odds. Few of us want publicity at the cost of control, and few of us want complete protection at the cost of any sort of exposure. Thus, a balance is usually what is sought. You need to find your own balance, one that you are comfortable with. The following is what seems reasonable to me; but you might want to modify these ideas to find your own balance.

• In general, copyright notices and reminders are probably a good idea overall. But be aware that prominent or aggressively placed notices might discourage some people from sharing your work with others (and not all such sharing is bad for you).

• If you put a copyright notice on or very near each of your pictures, it might be a good idea to add, somewhere nearby, either in language or via Creative Commons symbols, some indication of how you would like your pictures to be treated.

• If you are using a photo-sharing site, be aware of how it handles such notices and conditions, to make sure it suits what you prefer. (I mentioned a site I often look at where the default notice is "copyright by / may not be used without permission." The site appears to give a contact option, but it often doesn't work. Many is the time I've wanted to use a picture I've found on that site—and give the photographer some publicity she might well covet—but couldn't.)

• If you are seeking or would welcome recognition, publicity, and/or customers, it is probably wise to make it relatively easy for people to contact you.

• If you want to put a notice on the picture itself, I suggest you use your website address or email address (unless you have a very distinctive name). I say this speaking as someone who has spent many hours trying (and often failing) to track down Joe Blow from a notice that just says "© 1999 Joseph Blow."

• The best protection against piracy is not to put your picture on the internet at all. Next best is to use a very small, low-resolution, poor-quality JPEG that no one will be able to use for much of anything even if they want to. Unfortunately, these measures directly conflict with the goal of presenting your work so that others see and appreciate it. Personally, I feel that it's worth it to make your work look good and suffer some piracy, rather than be miserly about it. But make your own determination.

• Seriously consider registering copyright on your "best" or "signature" images. It's time-consuming and expensive, so very few people do it for all, or even a majority, of their pictures; but we all know that most of our work is not terribly remarkable. We usually know what our best stuff is. Anyone who uses your picture to make any kind of serious money will probably also be a "big fish" with deep pockets and significant resources. In fighting a battle with that sort of opponent, previous registration of your copyright will do you a world of good.

______________

John Lehet, Post Pond Flooded (© 2005 John Lehet, used with permission)

As an example of perhaps the best way of handling your online images, check out my friend John Lehet's site at www.lehet.com. He's just transitioning to marking his images, so not all of them are marked, but those that are have an unobtrusive mark with a faint copyright symbol and his website address (note that this is not a legal copyright notice; the copyright symbol in this case is just a reminder). It doesn't interfere with the pictures, but unless a pirate deliberately obscures it, it makes it possible for people encountering his JPEGs elsewhere to find their way back to him. He uses relatively large JPEGs that make his work look good, which leaves him open to theft, but the protections he's put in place are judicious and well considered.

Now go to the bottom of his home page and click on "Licensing." The main goal of his site is to sell prints; but here, John spells out what else his pictures may and may not be used for and how interested parties can proceed. This is enormously helpful to any photo researcher. Finally, note that he makes it easy to contact him (in several ways), for further information or to get questions answered that aren't covered at the website.

______________

And one final recommendation:

• No system is perfect. You sacrifice some protection for the sake of presentation, and you may lose out on some publicity for the sake of preserving your rights. So don't take it too hard when something goes awry one way or the other. Find your own balance, be open to modifying it in the future in case it's not working for you, but then try to relax and not worry about it too much. This stuff can drive you crazy if you let it—and it's seldom worth that.

______________

Mike  (thanks to John Lehet and many of the commenters to our previous posts on this topic)