What lesson can we extract from this? When an institution that houses any important photo/art collection gets into financial trouble, the photo/art community needs to sound an alert and, collectively and aggressively, monitor the situation and seek solutions thereto. The earlier the better. […]
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September 6th, 2009 | Tags: Charles and Ray Eames, Christopher Mahoney, Denise Bethel, Edwin H. Land, intellectual property, Polaroid, Polaroid Collection, Polavision, Richard Kirstel, Sotheby's, Wagstaff Collection | Category: News Commentary | 2 comments Alas . . . All Our Love’s in Vain First, the good news: Four of the letters objecting to the proposed Minnesota Bankruptcy Court approval of sale of the Polaroid Collection — those sent by myself, Judy Dater, Bea Nettles, and Jan Pietrzak — arrived in time to get entered into the record […] August 28th, 2009 | Tags: Ansel Adams, Barbara Hitchcock, copyright law, Edwin H. Land, Eelco Wolf, George H. Singer, George Slade, Gregory Kishel, intellectual property, Jon Holmes, Linda Benedict-Jones, Manfred Heiting, Polaroid, Polaroid Collection, Sam Yanes, Sotheby's | Category: News Commentary | 8 comments There is no clear disposition of the roughly 14,300 less valuable objects, which remain in the hands of whoever runs Polaroid as of August 31, when Polaroid converts from Chapter 11 bankruptcy to Chapter 7. (Friday, August 28 is the last day for all employees, though some will transfer roles and become contractors.) Sotheby’s has, apparently, offered to serve as an agent for institutions that might want to acquire the collection. Although earlier attempts to find buyers, with the 1700 “cream” works still part of the bargain, met with no acceptable offers, the auction house now has the freedom to go through the entire collection and make unspecified further arrangements regarding the items it has been given permission to auction. […] August 27th, 2009 | Tags: copyright law, corporate support, Denise Bethel, George H. Singer, George Slade, Gregory Kishel, intellectual property, Mitchell Zuckerman, Polaroid, Polaroid Collection, Sotheby's | Category: Guest Post, News Commentary | 8 comments Based on my admittedly layman’s reading of these documents, they constitute non-exclusive subsidiary-rights licenses based on the exchange of either money or goods for those rights, not transfers of ownership. What Polaroid acquired by that exchange appears voluntarily restricted on Polaroid’s part to “the right to republish my image(s)” and/or “the worldwide non-exclusive rights for exhibition and editorial (non-commercial) publication purposes of the following images in perpetuity.” Since these letters of agreement and release forms originated with the Polaroid Corporation, we can reasonably assume that their terms represent what Polaroid sought to obtain from the photographers with whom they chose to collaborate in this way. […] August 26th, 2009 | Tags: Barbara Hitchcock, copyright law, corporate support, George Slade, Gregory Kishel, intellectual property, La Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Musee de l'Elysee, PBE Corporation, Petters International, Polaroid, Polaroid Collection, Sotheby's | Category: News Commentary | 2 comments |
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NY Times Photo Ethics Policy Meets Edgar Martins
Martins’s contract stipulated digitally unaltered images (beyond the minimal tweaking described in the above memo), and he repeatedly asserted to Times staffers — including the writer of the accompanying Times Magazine article, several editors, and the fact checker at the magazine — that his images conformed to those guidelines. Where I come from, we call that lying, when its source is a photographer commissioned to document the real estate bust. Reading Martins’s own “annotations” of his now-controversial images, it seems clear that he felt free to exercise extreme license in montaging and altering his illustrations, rationalizing this activity with a logic and vocabulary far more commonplace in the discourse around creative photography than in that related to photojournalism and documentary work. […]