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documentation vs. art
Feb. 23rd, 2009 04:28 pmA friend of mine (who I'm not sure wants to be identified) is having problems regarding photographs as intellectual property and who owns it and how it can/should be used. The strong emotional reactions involved really got me to thinking about what it means to record an image (or a sound).
When I take pictures, it is usually in my capacity as an ethnomusicologist, which means that I consider the photos and recordings that I make to contain the property of my consultants that I use in specific ways with their permission. I always offer to give my recordings and photos to my consultants and would never dream of charging them for it (and really try to avoid bringing capital into the discussion lest they want to be paid for being recorded for scholarly use).
However, sometimes photography is art, which brings a whole bunch of other metaphors into play. Photos as art have to do with capturing light and image in creative ways and because of the creativity, the rights to image are swayed more toward the person who took the photo rather than the people (or animals or rock formations) that are being photographed. Honestly I'm not sure of the ethics involved when this is engaged in, but I assume that people who are being photographed as art still must give permissions for the use of their image, but I'm not sure if they are usually given compensation by the artist for modeling or if they pay to be made into art. There are probably lots of different possibilities. Certainly there is the idea in our society that the artist will be compensated at some point by someone buying his or her photo. I'm also not sure how this fits in with the larger art world where one has an original painting for instance and then can also sell prints of it. It's not entirely clear to me what the "original" is in photography. The result seems more like a series of either printed or digital simulacra. Is there an "as art" equivalent to making recordings? Perhaps sampling or something like that. The recording of "music as art" would probably fall into my last category.
And this brings me to photography as a service. Somewhere in between documentation and art seems to be the area that most professional photographers make their bread and butter: photography as a service that is paid for by those in the photographs (usually at weddings). This also lines up with the livelihoods of most recording engineers (and videographers) for musical productions. In this case there's usually a clear line. The photographer is hired for a rate and then charges for prints and/or digital copies of the photos taken, which are clearly owned not by the people in them, but the person who is hired to take them.
I'm now interested in how all of the assumptions in these three metaphors collide. It reminds me a bit of when I heard about ethics discussions around fieldwork in the discipline of political science, where the ethics and legal discussions completely centered around protecting the research, not the groups of people that he/she is researching. Ethics discussions about fieldwork in anthropology and most ethnographic disciplines focus on the rights of the groups that are being researched. I obviously come out on one side of that debate on ethics if only because of the power relationship usually involved when academics from American and European universities do research in other areas of the world. This issue of intellectual property when it comes to photography seems much more complicated and flexible, even though the law might be completely clear. I'd love to hear what other folks think on this topic, especially those photographers on my friends list.
When I take pictures, it is usually in my capacity as an ethnomusicologist, which means that I consider the photos and recordings that I make to contain the property of my consultants that I use in specific ways with their permission. I always offer to give my recordings and photos to my consultants and would never dream of charging them for it (and really try to avoid bringing capital into the discussion lest they want to be paid for being recorded for scholarly use).
However, sometimes photography is art, which brings a whole bunch of other metaphors into play. Photos as art have to do with capturing light and image in creative ways and because of the creativity, the rights to image are swayed more toward the person who took the photo rather than the people (or animals or rock formations) that are being photographed. Honestly I'm not sure of the ethics involved when this is engaged in, but I assume that people who are being photographed as art still must give permissions for the use of their image, but I'm not sure if they are usually given compensation by the artist for modeling or if they pay to be made into art. There are probably lots of different possibilities. Certainly there is the idea in our society that the artist will be compensated at some point by someone buying his or her photo. I'm also not sure how this fits in with the larger art world where one has an original painting for instance and then can also sell prints of it. It's not entirely clear to me what the "original" is in photography. The result seems more like a series of either printed or digital simulacra. Is there an "as art" equivalent to making recordings? Perhaps sampling or something like that. The recording of "music as art" would probably fall into my last category.
And this brings me to photography as a service. Somewhere in between documentation and art seems to be the area that most professional photographers make their bread and butter: photography as a service that is paid for by those in the photographs (usually at weddings). This also lines up with the livelihoods of most recording engineers (and videographers) for musical productions. In this case there's usually a clear line. The photographer is hired for a rate and then charges for prints and/or digital copies of the photos taken, which are clearly owned not by the people in them, but the person who is hired to take them.
I'm now interested in how all of the assumptions in these three metaphors collide. It reminds me a bit of when I heard about ethics discussions around fieldwork in the discipline of political science, where the ethics and legal discussions completely centered around protecting the research, not the groups of people that he/she is researching. Ethics discussions about fieldwork in anthropology and most ethnographic disciplines focus on the rights of the groups that are being researched. I obviously come out on one side of that debate on ethics if only because of the power relationship usually involved when academics from American and European universities do research in other areas of the world. This issue of intellectual property when it comes to photography seems much more complicated and flexible, even though the law might be completely clear. I'd love to hear what other folks think on this topic, especially those photographers on my friends list.
