We must consider the decision by Donald R. Winslow of the National Press Photographers Aassociation (NPPA) to employ a suspect journalistic approach for this particular article — the discredited “he said, she said” model — and his choice of writer to practice it on this set of issues as calculated, not inadvertent, and definitely not ignorant or uninformed. […]
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Instead of securing licenses for all these replications of other photographers’ works, Sandro Miller relied instead on a legal opinion interpreting the “fair use” exception to the copyright law as covering these restagings. I don’t see how simply replicating a scenario with John Malkovich substituting for the original subject comments in any significant way on the image from which its iconography derives. With all other elements of each image duplicated as faithfully as possible, is Malkovich’s presence in and of itself “transformative”? […] Photographers’ commonplace practice of basing photographs on works of graphic art, often in detail and faithful to the originals, is celebrated, not condemned, by the very same community that objects, vociferously, when painters and other graphic artists imitate or derive iconography from photographic images. What inexplicable double standard operates here? […] I confess, with a shudder but of my own volition, that I agree with the Fox News decision to publish “Healing the Believers’ Chests,” the complete 22:34-minute ISIS video of the burning alive of captured Jordanian pilot Muadh al-Kasasbeh. I watched it there — not for thrills, but because (a) as a citizen of the country that ISIS has declared its mortal enemy I want to know the threat that confronts us, and (b) I feel obligated as a critic to actually experience work in its entirety, no matter how difficult its content, before considering and commenting on it. […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014 |
RICO Case Against Ferguson, MO
Today, March 17, 2015, at We the People — The White House, I initiated a petition to the Obama Administration to “order the Dept. of Justice to initiate a RICO case against the city government, courts, and police force of Ferguson, MO.” […]