Now things are getting interesting. A few days after the AP threatened legal action against Shepard Fairey for his HOPE poster of Obama, Shepard Fairey is now suing the Associated Press. According to yesterday's New York Times, "the suit asks the judge to declare that Mr. Fairey's work is protected under fair-use exceptions to copyright law". State of the Art, American Photo magazine's blog, asked readers whether they think the AP has a case against Fairey. The comments are interesting, especially given that many of the blog's readers are probably photojournalists themselves. Most of them suggest that Fairey's alterations of the original photograph, beginning with his close cropping of Mannie Garcia's original, make it an acceptable appropriation.
Coincidentally, this week I'm introducing the idea of appropriation in my visual politics class. We're looking at some Hariman and Lucaites work on iconic photographs, and talking about related concepts such as circulation and appropriation. The definition of appropriation I give my students is pretty simple: the use of borrowed elements to create a new work. That new work may animate, rework, challenge, or resist the original or themes the original activates. Tomorrow we're doing a visual case study of Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother photograph. They will read several (competing) narratives about the photograph and look at a bunch of appropriations, including my all-time favorite: a cover of The Nation featuring Migrant Mother dressed up as a Walmart employee.
The Fairey/AP case is a striking example of iconicity and appropriation because, unlike the images Hariman and Lucaites study in their book, Fairey took a workaday image and used it as the basis for creation of an iconic image. The Garcia photograph has now acquired its own iconicity by virtue of its appropriation by Fairey; only now, in retrospect, do we accord the image any special status. (In fact, Garcia has said that he had no idea that the HOPE poster used his image when it first began to circulate). The story of its discovery, along with the story of the controversy surrounding copyright and fair use, will now become a permanent part of the narrative of Fairey's iconic image.
More legal stuff here, including a clip of Fairey discussing the poster on The Colbert Report on Jan. 21, 2009.
This is only related in passing, but may be relevant for people who are interested in Fairey's work (like me).
He was arrested a few days ago in Boston under what seems to be pretty shady circumstances. I believe he is still being held there.
http://tinyurl.com/cqu2yd
Posted by: Jon Stone | 11 February 2009 at 10:42 AM