American visual history, the New York Times, and me

A few weeks ago the New York Times Sunday magazine published a photograph from the 1930s that got me so riled up oa urged me to go ahead and "write a letter to them already." So I did.

To the editor: I am curious why editors chose to credit the private company Corbis as the source for Russell Lee's Depression-era photograph of a farm family (Nov. 9). Corbis does not own this image; the American people do. Lee's photograph exists in the public domain. It and tens of thousands of other photographs made between 1935 and 1943 are part of the vast Farm Security Administration archive housed in the Library of Congress. This unique collection provides remarkable visual insight into all aspects of daily life in America during the Depression. Today, any member of the public with an Internet connection can access and reproduce good-quality digital versions of these images free of charge... Corporate America does not own Russell Lee's photograph; you and I do.

I suspected that the NYT was simply using Corbis's image database as an easy resource for the picture, hence the photo credit. But technically, the FSA images are not theirs to sell. When Corbis "sells" public domain images, what it's really selling is convenience - no small thing when photo editors need a quick illustration on deadline. But my point is that the New York Times is mispresenting the evidence when it tells its readers this image comes from Corbis.

While the NYT didn't publish my letter, I did recently receive two follow-up emails: one from the magazine's photo editor and another from the researcher who originally unearthed the Lee photo. The photo editor indicated that she was unaware of this specific image's status in the public domain, but confirmed that they got the image from Corbis because of the convenience. The researcher also emailed to let me know that he would be more careful about crediting such images in the future. In subsequent exchanges with the NYT folks I suggested that in such cases a credit like "Library of Congress via Corbis" would be fair, because it would acknowledge both the provenance of the image as well as the immediate source. In the end, I'm pleased that these folks seem to care enough to correspond with me at all.

There's a lot to say here about how we archive American visual history, who "owns" it, etc.; as many of you know, these are ongoing questions in my research. For now, I'll note that one reason I find this whole exchange fascinating is because it eerily parallels the FSA's relationship to mainstream media during the years the agency was operating. The FSA project's head, Roy Stryker, routinely griped that the agency was too infrequently credited as a source of its images. If photographers were credited at all (and sometimes even they weren't), photo editors rarely thought to credit the FSA. Stryker's letters are dominated by rants about magazines and newspapers that didn't properly credit the agency for its work. Without such credits to prove the program's influence, Stryker worried that the government wouldn't allow the work to continue.

Today, I have a different but related worry. If people don't know these projects existed, and that these images belong to all of us, then we've lost something vital to our own American visual history. And that would be too bad.

Comments

[rhosa]

GREAT post, cara. thank you. they should have printed your letter. expand it into an op-ed and try again, there or somewhere else? really important point to make, especially in the context of re-inventions of "public works" programs by the next administration. scott simon asked a guest in passing on this morning's "Weekend Edition Saturday" why the federal government would bail out "financial institutions" and possibly car companies ... but not, for instance, newspapers. what precisely is in the public interest and what the public "owns" are great questions. can't wait to read this work of yours (too).

[Charis Wilson]

Thank you for trying to keep the NYT honest in its citation of the work done by the men and women who worked under my grandfather at the FSA. I do not know if you are aware of it or not but the Library of Congress itself has found that even though many of these iconic images have been available for years via their website, most people did not know about their availability. They discovered this discrepancy when they posted many of the images on Fliker. You can see the full report at http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/flickr_pilot.html