documentation vs. art

[merchimerch]

A 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.

Comments

[sps.livejournal.com]

[very slight devil's advocate mode...]

I think there's a further consideration. I go to a famous building (let us say), and there are people there on vacation. Is it plausible to ask me to get the permission of each and every one of them to be photographed? Would they even care to be bothered by someone asking such permission? Most likely I would prefer them not to be there, but what can I do about it? In any event, can I not argue that it is their choice to be out in public, and to be seen by whoever happens to be present? By extension, could I not argue that my camera simply extends the number of people who can perceive this public place, and in no way changes the circumstances of those who might happen to pass before my lens?

I certainly object to those who want to control the use of photography (or indeed tape recorders) for private use, in any circumstance whatever. I have, it seems to me, a complete right to my own memories, whether I hold them in my head or on paper, and anyone who does something in front of me of which they are (let us say) ashamed, should simply not have done that thing. Come to that, is it not my business whether I report what I saw by saying, 'here, let me tell you about it' or by saying, 'here, let me show you a picture'?

It would appear that any objection to this is a direct attack on the rights of the disabled. I happen not to be eidetic. I rapidly lose the enjoyment of my experiences if I do not take steps to record them. Others lack the gift of description, and while they may hold memories in their heads, cannot communicate those memories without technological assistance. Are we then to be punished for this incapacity? How so? And if so, why would I build wheelchair ramps? I can say, well, I'm sorry, it's your choice to employ the technological assistance of wheels!

It is perhaps a different matter in the specific case of someone who is putting on a performance, whether at their suggestion or mine, and there is some contractual negotiation. If I say, pretty lady, would you be willing to stand by this window and look over there, and she says, 'why yes, but there are strings attached,' or again, if I engage someone to sing me a song or tell me a story or explain something to me, and so, at some possible inconvenience to themselves, they do this thing. Perhaps I can see them putting conditions on the performance, such as that I should not record it—but that is a negotiation, and at very least I can take my business elsewhere. And I still dislike it, because what is the point of an experience that I cannot later recall?

And in a shared public place, when someone's actions are not performed with my encouragement, then who is infringing upon whom when I want to make a recording?

If I were debating, I would take this argument one step further, and suggest that there is little to distinguish the impulse to control information about things that have actually happened and historical revisionism. But the suggested equation of ethnographic delicacy with holocaust denial is the sort of thing that I do for performance purposes only. After all, one needs to control the context ;).

[sps.livejournal.com]

Oh, I neglected to say: I think there are two schools of thought in photography. Those who are excited by photoshop I think of as doing something akin to sampling in modern music; the result of their work may be entirely divorced, at least from a structural perspective, from the original percept. The photograph supplies only textures which are mapped and remapped to create the secondary, become primary, work. Those who are disturbed by it are, in contrast, are the ultimate performance artists. Their work involves putting themselves in the position to perceive certain things, and the camera is a tool to move the audience's viewpoint. To date, this works best with sight, but other senses are following (I noticed with interest that the music researchers I worked with at McGill were collecting a library of impulse responses of acoustically significant buildings around the world, so that they could reproduce the acoustic experience of simply being in these places—not, of course, that there isn't an obvious artistic and subsequently commercial value in convolving these recordings with musical and verbal performances).