This blog’s subscriber base has grown slowly but steadily since my first post of June 1, 2009. I’m grateful for the willingness of subscribers to stick with me as I develop my own approach to blogging, which falls somewhere between cultural journalism and critical essay-writing, a far cry from casual blogging and tweeting. […]
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My father, Earl Maxwell Coleman, passed away on October 12, 2009. Earl was known to the photography community as the publisher who founded Da Capo Press, a humanities division of its parent company that began by issuing reprints of some significant photo publications, but soon moved into the production of new works as well. […] Sometime between January 2003 and April 2009, somewhere between 6000-8000 works vanished from the Polaroid Collection. And no one seems to care — not the Minnesota Bankruptcy Court, which in August ’09 authorized the sale of the remainder of the collection at auction; not Sotheby’s, designated as the auction house of choice for the procedure; not the art/photo press, which to date has shown no interest in any aspect of the dissolution of this great collection; and not even the current possessors of the collection. . . . […] Peter Marshall, the British writer/photographer who produced hundreds (thousands?) of articles on photography for About.com, has some thoughtful comments about my recent posts on intellectual-property issues (see #1, #2, and #3) up at his blog, >Re: PHOTO, in his November 9, 2009 post, “Writing for Free.” Though he’s not a full-time working writer, Marshall did […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014 |
Polaroid Collection: Update 11
I think it is incumbent on the Polaroid Corporation to answer some increasingly urgent questions. To wit: How does the Polaroid Corporation account for the discrepancy between the repeated estimate of 22,000-24,000 prints in the collection, given out by the Polaroid Corporation as recently as summer 2009, and the official inventory of 16,000 presented to the Minnesota court in spring 2009? Can the Polaroid Corporation verify its actual acquisition and legal ownership of all the works it claims as its outright property in the Polaroid Collection, above and beyond authorization from the courts to sell them? […]