Assignment 2.4 Ethics in Digital Medial (AKA My Rant On "Stolen Work")
So a while back one of my favorite artistic photographers, Jenna Martin, posted an interesting article on her blog about stealing work in photography. This post was the first thing that came to mind when I had to write about Ethics in Digital Media. You can find her original post here:
http://jennamartinphotoblog.com/2014/08/09/can-just-stop-complaining-ideas-stolen/
One particular example she gave interested me quite a bit.
After posting the image on the left, Martin received a catty email from fellow photographer Benjamin Von Wong saying, “Hey, you didn’t see MY image, did you?” I think it’s rather lucky for her, that Von Wong, a fairly well regarded blogger and multimedia digital artist, didn’t take this dispute any further. It may simply be because they’re both artists that no further action was taken.
WOW sorry for all that backstory!
Here we have two images with the same subjects in common: a seated young woman, a typewriter, and fluttering pages. If you want to look at date stamps, Von Wong’s version of this photograph was created first, but Jenna Martin claims she had never even heard of Benjamin Von Wong until receiving to earlier mentioned email. Photography is a career for both of theses artists, so they both profit from selling prints of images like this one. The question: who has the right to sell their image?
There is a very impulsive reaction with photographers that makes them to get rather territorial with their art. It’s an incredibly competitive industry, so it makes sense that they often jump the gun on calling people out for “stealing” work, even if it is just an adaption. Jenna Martin is potentially selling an image to buyers who may have otherwise purchased his piece, and therefore she is taking away from his profits. If photographers are competitive about anything more than who gets paid, it’s who is more creative. By having Martin’s photos out in the world, he could be losing credibility as an artist.
Martin points out in her blog post, that this wasn’t even the image she had in her head when she set out to shoot that day. However, due to practical limitations of her original idea, she ended up with one that happened to resemble Van Wong’s. She claims simple ideas aren’t unique, physical objects, so how is it possible for one artist to take ownership of them? Even if she HAD seen his picture first, he should be flattered for being someone’s inspiration.
Photography is a super sticky subject when it comes to all this copyright stuff. Just look at what Martin shared later in her post.
Two of these images are hers, yet upon further digging, she found that pictures of people floating out a window are so overdone that you can actually find stock photos of them. Does that mean she has any less right to sell her images? I don’t really think so. While photography may adhere to slightly different rules than parody videos on YouTube, I don’t think we can take art inspired by other art and say NOT art. The Constitution of the United States says copyrights exist to “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.” And there is no way to progress art without inspiration.
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