Archive for 2012-04-01

As part of a seminar that Kristianne Drake and Mandy Jandrell put together, we were given the task of reading extracts from the Charlotte Cotton book “The Photograph As Contemporary Art”, this is a fascinating book which goes to tell the narratives, hidden meanings and a general back story to each image. As well as some very interesting pieces about the nature of photography itself.
My extract was on Tableau Photography, this is the hinted and often obvious use of narrative from fables, fairy tales, apocryphal events and myths that will play to our consciousness of each image. This method of bringing a narrative to images is absolutely vital,  and no image can be held seriously without meaning, whether it references to old fables or not.

I recently read an article about Phillip DiCorcia being sued by one of the poepl he had photographed in his series of pictures based in Times Square NY.
(See *1 for background info on this case)

I made a big fuss about how one could justify $500,000 worth of compensation for a single image and that it seemed completely unjust and blown out of the water just so this one bloke could make money from DiCorcia’s fame.

Here is a similar scenario, but the Photographer Richard Rinsdorf is suing the shoe company Sketchers for violating the license agreement for a number of images he produced between 2006-2009. Part of the license agreement stated that Sketchers could use this image for up to six months, but the images must cease being used there after.
It turns out Sketchers have carried on using his images for years after the six month period ran out, but in different countries to try and avoid him finding out.
Rinsdorf has demanded a staggering $250,000,000 in compensation for this violation of the contract…

At first I was staggered and once more ashamed that people have the audacity to demand such an extraordinary amount of money for something like this. But once you read more into it, you can understand that one single violation of an image, copyright and contract could justify a sum of $150,000 in compensation, so if you take into consideration that his pictures have been violated many times all over the world, you can start to comprehend the staggering sum of $250,000,000.

As the case pans out I’ll be interested to see how much money he actually makes out of this, I’ll post about it again when I have more information. 

*1 

Between 1999-2001 Philip-Lorca diCorcia photographed pedestrians in Times Square, NYC.
The resulting works were shown at Pace/MacGill Gallery in Chelsea. When Erno
Nussenzweig, an Orthodox Jew and retired diamond merchant from Union City,
N.J., saw his picture in the exhibition catalogue, he sued diCorcia and Pace
for exhibiting and publishing the portrait without permission and profiting
from it financially. The suit sought an injunction to halt sales and
publication of the photograph, as well as $500,000 in compensatory damages and
$1.5 million in punitive damages.The suit was eventually dismissed by a New
York State Supreme Court judge who said that the photographer's right to
artistic expression trumped the subject's privacy rights.

Mr. Nussenzweig's lawyer, Jay Goldberg, told The New York Law Journal that his
client "has lost control over his own image" he went on to say
"It's a terrible invasion to me," Mr. Goldberg said. "The last
thing a person has is his own dignity."

The stand out blog for me was Lenscratch, as much as I like blogs to offer an in-depth opinion and spin on what you’re looking at, I see them more as a springboard of inspiration. What I want from a blog is to have the opportunity to jump through loads of pictures and be inspired by what I see, but not only that, I want the opportunity to read articles and learn more as well. And I feel that this is exactly what Lenscratch offers me as a reader.
This is something I will be taking on board big time when my blog starts to gain more substance and pace.

Semiotics are an everyday symbol we come across, they represent places and items without the need of a social contextualisation or wording of what they are. It’s very interesting how we’re brought up around these symbols, but never actually told exactly what they mean, we just know, as if our watching of other peoples actions and behaviours has shown us what they stand for.
Semiotics can hold great significance for explaining situations and rules without the need to make huge lists, which we would not even attempt to read because of their length. Most people will just ignore signs with lots of writing because they see it as irrelevant. Whereas when we use semiotic signs people can just scan around and know exactly what they mean in the matter of milliseconds.

That’s the everyday use of semiotics, but where they start to get really interesting is the semiotics in music videos/films/art work etc they take on a completely different entity, where they can symbolise not only rules (what most semiotics in everyday life represent) but instead hint towards wealth, power, having a family, and pretty much anything you could imagine.