Easy money!
On the morning of 25 May, we ran link to a story about the “artist” Richard Prince on our Facebook page. And suffice to say, the reactions were scathing. And why wouldn't they be? We as photographers should be justifiably furious and enraged that some calling themselves an artist can get away with a practice that is so minimally connected to any true and original creative art.
You may question why we’ve used inverted commas for Prince's title. Well, Mr. Prince’s latest exhibition involved appropriating, although many more call it stealing, the work of other photographers from their Instagram accounts, printing them large and putting them on display in a New York gallery. The prints were being sold for up to US$100,000 each. To be fair to Prince, he did add a comment on the Instagram feed that appears below the printed image, so maybe he should justifiably collect a portion of the sale. Maybe one thousandth, for his contribution.
Did he seek permission to use the images? No. Are any of the proceeds going to those that actually produced the work? No. But Prince is an old hand at this caper, which goes back to the mid-1970s when he stole Sam Abell’s image of a cowboy from a Marlboro ad. And that was to be the first of numerous such incidents, from which Prince has profited handsomely.
Quite frankly, to have so little creativity that you have to rip off other people’s Instagram images, and then profit from them, is, in a word, lame. But is the practice actually illegal? If it’s not, then clearly the law has to change. It’s an absolute outrage that Prince should be able to engage in such practices with impunity.
Unsurprisingly, Prince has been quoted as saying, “copyright has never interested me.” Well, if I were to start robbing banks, I’m pretty sure that the laws that expressly forbade that activity probably wouldn’t interest me either. The fact that he last lost copyright infringement lawsuits in the past does not appear to be much a deterrent whatsoever. And this reveals just how weak the laws really are.
One of the photographers, Doe Deere, the CEO and Founder of Lime Crime Makeup, was aware of the use of her image, but indicated on her Instagram account that she would not be pursuing Prince. It’s not the first time that Price has put photographers’ noses out of joint, and in 2008, he was successful in the landmark intellectual property case, Cariou v. Prince, where his use of some of Cariou’s work was deemed “fair use”.
The exhibition, New Portraits, was on display at the Gagosian Gallery, in Madison Avenue, New York, and featured 38 canvases measuring 4x6 foot. The gallery has also exhibited many of the superstars of the photography world, including Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Gregory Crewdson, William Eggleston, and Andreas Gursky, amongst others, so it's surprising that they deem Prince's "creations" as worthy.
Most recently, the work was on display at Frieze New York, which bills itself as "one of the world's leading contemporary art fairs". Prominent Australian photographer, and founder of The Photo Watchdog, William Long, took to social media to vent his disgust at the organisers of Frieze for allowing what Price produced to be part of the fair. On the Frieze Facebook page, he asked how they could "support selling stolen work." He went on to say that "just because an image is uploaded to Instagram does not make it fair game to anyone to download and sell as their original work. Shame on your organisati
Closer to home
When Prince cast his net, he unwittingly, and foolishly, used one of Australian fashion photographer, Peter Coulson's images. With a very strong style, Coulson's images are easily identifiable, and it's not the first time that he's had his work ripped off. Annoyingly for Coulson, this is a situation that he's faced on numerous occasions throughout his career. But this time things are going to be different. A law firm in the US contacted Coulson recently and offered their services pro bono. On his Facebook page, Coulson asks how it's legal that a model can give away a photographer's copyright because the model put it on Instagram, and how something can be called "fair use" if the copyright owner gets nothing and the "photocopier" Richard Prince gets $90,000. Sadly, we don't have the answers.
This story is far from over, and we'll be watching the development with great interest as they unfold.
The exhibition comes down.
If you're intersted to learn more about copyright and IP, check out this feature.