Friday, May 9, 2014

The Image - A Covenant of Uncompromising Trust



Over the past two days a couple of stories have erupted on an old, but problematic issue that will never go away yet now more than ever is fanned into full fire by global digital winds: image theft.

Thousands of words have been written on the subject and I'm tired of repeating any of them. My complaint, my concern, here lies in the breaking of what I believe is the "Photograph's Covenant" the image creates an uncompromising trust with the viewer. It says what you see is real, the truth.

Simple theft has reparation. I can asked to be credited, I can ask for the abuser to stop using the image, I can sue their arse off. Breaking the Covenant destroys something I can never repair.

One could extend the Covenant to documentary film and journalistic reporting, both audio and writing, as well. It's simple—the viewer's trust is in the reality of photograph's content. It's an unspoken trust of truth. As photographer Ami Vitale said in a recent NYTimes Lens interview The Real Story About the Wrong Photos in #BringBackOurGirls, regarding an egregious disregard of the covenant:
We are responsible as photographers and journalists when we make promises to do justice to their stories and honor them in the way that they have honored us by sharing their stories." 

Like the loss of trust in all relationships, once compromised there is forever lingering doubt. But what saddens and frustrates me more is the increasing disinterest in the trust. No one thinks about it and no one seems to care (except the original creators.) And once decapitated it is gone. As in this example when I recently attended a film documentary about photographer Vivian Maier with friend/photographer Joni Kabana, in Joni's words:

"Another example that some might not realize constitutes theft: last weekend I went to see the Vivian Maier documentary and I saw someone photographing her images, up close, that were on the promotional poster. When I went over and pleasantly reminded her that she was infringing on copyright material, she got nasty and said to leave her alone. She continued to photograph the images so that they looked like she took them. I continued by saying she could not post or use them anywhere, as the rights to the image belong to the photographer."

Sharing images and content from so many sources, from around the world, has inspired and enabled a wonderfully powerful change that I celebrate. Like all changes there are cost, some appropriate, some too high. Loss of the Covenant is too high because we pay that price with our trust.


Above Photo: A screen shot taken from Chris Brown's Twitter account May 1, 2014, depicting the Twitter campaign for #BringBackOurGirls that went viral regarding the hundreds of Nigerian school girls kidnapped by Boko Haram. The images, created by photographer Ami Vitale in 2000 in Guinea-Bissau, has absolutely no relationship to the school girl kidnappings.

To see Ami Vitale's original story with the images used as she intended Guinea-Bissau: Rediscovering the Soul of a Forgotten Land
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