“Photographer hereby acknowledges and agrees that all rights, title and interest (including copyright) in and to the Photograph(s) shall be owned by Lady Gaga and Photographer hereby transfers and assigns any such rights to Lady Gaga.”

In other words, full ownership of the work your employer paid you to do goes to her for ever more as a condition of getting through the gate.

Rights grabbing contracts are common in the music industry and they have caught on in sport too, where they have lead to some major disputes and media boycotts.

But while there would seem to be plenty to be outraged about here, there’s also the view that this contract is not worth the paper it’s written on.

While any self-employed business person would decline to sign it unless they see some purpose in unpaid labour, for staff photographers it gets a little more interesting. The record label or manager is attempting to seek a contractual commitment from a company through an employee who doesn’t actually have the legal right to commit them to it. Just as you wouldn’t see them signing a loan application at the bank on behalf of their employer, they’re similarly not legally entitled to sign a copyright contract giving away their employer’s property.

For this reason, amongst a whole host of others kept closer to their chests but ultimately untested in court, media lawyers think such a contract is entirely unenforceable in Australia, and have actually advised signing them just to get through the front door.

Lady Gaga’s copyright grab.

]]> http://www.wadelaube.com/blog/a-hollow-grab-at-copyright/feed/ 0 http://www.wadelaube.com/blog/a-photo-department-without-photographers/ http://www.wadelaube.com/blog/a-photo-department-without-photographers/#comments Sun, 29 Jan 2012 00:33:25 +0000 Wade http://www.wadelaube.com/blog/?p=3760 For those in the print media the next redundancy round always seems just around the corner. Evaporating revenue sources and an inability to discover new ones has led to an ongoing attack on the other side of the ledger. And it’s made press photographers an endangered species.

Relentless cost cutting is not the most innovative or imaginative business strategy but you wouldn’t argue with it if you’ve seen the numbers. Something has got to give and the only debate is what.

Since payroll is the biggest slice of the pie, staff redundancies have become so common that most do their best not to retire without one.

Just last week a major shareholder at Fairfax called for another 5,000 heads there (blatantly ridiculous in quantity at least). In any event, staff reductions at newspapers and magazines will continue until they find their new equilibrium, and until then the powers that be have the recurring challenge of deciding who they can and can’t do without. Which brings me to my point.

Media writer at the Guardian, Roy Greenslade (whose own paper won’t be around in five years under current conditions) wrote last week of the latest cuts at another major London masthead. The Independent has relieved itself of the very last of its staff photographers, to rely solely on agencies and freelancers, and Professor Greenslade ponders whether anyone will actually notice:

“I’m also uncertain whether it’s possible to show that the move from staff to freelance contributors will result, or has resulted, in a diminution in quality.”

In decades passed such a masthead might employ “lensmen”, as the poms put it, by the dozen. Those were the golden years, a lifetime ago, when British newspapers made a lot of money and hired a lot of people. But when that money dried up the fat had to be found and it had to be trimmed. So in the modern era it’s been more like a handful; a core staff to compliment a growing reliance on agencies, supplemented by an expanding roster of freelancers.

The worst case scenario always assumed that while the core might get smaller, it would always remain. Alas, not at The Independent.

But to the question of whether there’s any impact on quality — I, at least, was in no doubt when I moved to London in 2007. The extent to which British press photography had already suffered was obvious, both in quality and originality. That’s what happens when you have to run on the smell of an oily rag, I suppose.

Standards were much lower than I’d been led to expect by the esteem with which papers like the Guardian were still held at home. So it surprised me to see agency or file photographs on page one more often than not, or that the same masthead would so often see fit to greet its readers at the newsstand with something as unengaging as a tightly cropped headshot above the fold.

The Guardian wasn’t alone. On Fleet Street, exclusivity and originality seemed to matter most on the social pages.

This was all such a great contrast to the Australian newspapers I’d been familiar with, like the Sydney Morning Herald and its competitors, whose editors were essentially professionally bound to secure fresh and unique photography for every news page — inside and out — where ever possible.

But the Brits were in a world of hurt and those editors were playing the cards they’d been dealt. They might argue these are the sacrifices they’re compelled to make to survive. And far be it from me to argue with that.

But the notion that there is no “diminution of quality” when a metropolitan daily newspaper no longer has even a solitary staff photographer to its name is pure fantasy.

I wouldn’t have to labour the point that an over reliance on agencies leads to an undersupply of originality. If we all buy from the same store we all end up with the same brands. But exclusivity, while commercially important, is only part of the picture. There’s also quality.

Photojournalists and press photographers set out to deliver pictures that add a journalistic dimension that the accompanying words cannot. As pretty as a picture might be, it’s not meant to be a decoration. It’s meant to be meaningful, intelligent, stand-alone journalism.

Producing such a thing almost always takes a level of preparation, planning, foresight, or at least waiting around, all with a real possibility of returning empty handed. It’s a gamble, but you have to be in it to win it. That requires an editor in a position to indulge the right person with all the time they need to get the job done. That is, an editor with resources.

Instead, a photo department without photographers is invariably too tightly funded for its freelancers to do any of this. A value judgement has already been made that cutting edge photojournalism is a sacrifice they’re willing to make to save money.

Nor can a photo department without photographers take advantage of specialisation, be it by genre, geography or technology. Photo editors know and employ the horses for courses philosophy – you’d avoid sending someone inclined towards portraits out to a bushfire, or a hard news specialist to a portrait sitting, given any sort of say in the matter. But when you have no photographers you have no say, and it becomes a first cab off the rank system amongst the freelancers that you do have.

And no longer would there be any corporate knowledge — no organisational memory where, whatever the assignment, someone has dealt with it before and can advise.

But to a point the Professor might be right. On a day-by-day basis no one will be highlighting to the readers the pictures they’re not getting, or the relative inferiority of the ones they are on account of the photographer having had four jobs to cover before lunch. The reader doesn’t immediately know what they’re missing when no one points it out to them. The unknown unknowns, you might say.

But rest assured that over time they will catch on because the very same factors that build goodwill for a masthead, like quality and originality, will begin to erode it once they’re absent.

This is all well and good, but what if the alternative is no business, no newspapers and no readership at all? Perhaps the powers that be at The Independent are again playing the cards they’ve been dealt.

Well, perhaps, but let us not insult press photographers past and present by understating the depth of their contribution, or the subtleties of their skill set, and let’s not belittle the readers by pretending they wouldn’t know the difference either way.

(In the same piece Professor Greenslade discusses a move towards reader supplied photography in other UK newspapers, something I’ve previously written about in these two posts, and I think the same points continue to apply).

DISCLOSURE: I took a voluntary redundancy last year.

That’s because at a certain point file size becomes more of a burden than a benefit. It brings with it upwards pressure on memory cards, hard drive capacity and computer speed in order to enable what are for the most part increasingly superfluous pixels. But still it’s considered the measure of a camera.

Since the beginning it’s been thought good practice to shoot and retain your originals at the highest possible file size, as insurance against unforeseen needs. This was particularly sensible in the days when those files were so much smaller and their publishing limitations much more easily reached.

But resolution has increased a hundred-fold since then and at some point somebody really had to press stop. Not that I’ve ever been able to do it — if it grew a hundred-fold again, I’d sure as houses just keep turning to Lacie and SanDisk before I’d touch that dial myself.

But it appears this time around Canon and Nikon have made the decision for us. Each has announced new top of the line cameras (Canon 1Dx, Nikon D4) and this time they’ve both seen fit to keep a lid on the megapixel counts.

To me that decision presses home a few points; that we’re reaching the practical limits of DSLR sensors; that the emphasis on file size even this far has been to the detriment of other important features; and that megapixels have been a marketing platform since the beginning.

To pick up on that last one: with marketing all along such a powerful force, why then should that change now? Well I expect we’ll soon discover this move continues to be about marketing — the marketing of a new product.

The following is part information, part speculation, but it does make perfect sense: both have applied ceilings to their DSLRs because they have plans to enter the medium-format market with big megapixel cameras (and new lenses) later this year. The marketers can tell you the importance of product differentiation.

Right now digital medium format is dominated by a handful of manufacturers charging far too much for what they do. But I‘d say that’s all about to change.

When I say “unstuck” I mean they were caught out, but not that Pyongyang would be at all troubled by that. And North Koreans themselves would be none the wiser, of course.

Unlike the efforts of dictators passed, the digital manipulation in this case was minor and does not appear to have much of an impact on the image beyond the aesthetic. And so some people have asked how much it really matters.

That’s a common question in these circumstances; why adjustments to a picture that improve it while having no other material impact shouldn’t in fact be condoned. We’re talking about cloning open eyes on top of squinting ones, removing litter from the foreground, power lines from the background or a tree branch that’s growing out of someone’s head. Otherwise, why then is dodging, burning, cropping or colour adjustment any different?

It’s surprising how often you hear this argument from strong advocates of photography, given how disturbingly misguided that makes them.

For the rebuttal, public trust is a pretty good place to start.

In publishing photojournalism you’re asking the viewer to accept its veracity on face value. If minor changes to the record were suddenly, somehow made permissible because you’ve decided they’re inconsequential, you’d be sending a message to your audience that you no longer guarantee absolutely the work’s truthfulness and so they’re entitled to doubt everything. No longer is the picture first and foremost a historical testament to what it portrays, but rather a loose representation as the creator saw fit to repackage and reshape it for them.

Now it’s true that the removal of power lines, litter or a tree branch in and of itself is unlikely to impact on the central historical testimony the picture is offering. These are more of the “white-lie” variety. It’s just that a single white-lie comprehensively undermines the credibility of that testimony. And in photojournalism credibility is all.

But let’s say that all sense is momentarily suspended and this new threshold is invoked. Where, then, would you draw the line? And who gets to draw it? It’s a thin-edge-of-the-wedge argument if ever there was one.

Photojournalism has battles on enough fronts today without wittingly undermining its key strength — its implicit integrity. So God only knows why any of its practitioners would argue in favour of eroding this by legitimising dishonesty.

There’s no better case study for this right now than the media. While it comes under public and government attack, there’s scarcely a hint of community interest, much less any popular protest by outraged readers. In theory this should surprise, given the media is meant to be at its core the public advocate, and all. But it doesn’t, and in fact you’ve got to conclude the press had it coming.

Public skepticism was building well before the federal government’s press inquiry in Australia or Leveson in the UK, which are both riding a wave of media antipathy that’s been building in the western world for a decade.

Things were always at their worst in Britain, where Fleet Street was saturated with so many mastheads that extreme tactics and a widespread ethical vacuum were borne out of the competition.

And as in Britain, Australian and US publishers responded to declining readership with the promotion of entertainment and gossip in the hope that this would attract the youth market. (It didn’t.) There’s been such a conflation of news and entertainment since that for many the role of the press has changed from fourth estate to light entertainer.

So we reach a point today where the press simply doesn’t have the collective authority or the credibility it once did — the authority to defend itself from attack or the credibility that its readers might feel they should do the same on its behalf.

This absence of goodwill is ironic because far from respecting the traditions of their beer swilling Fleet Street ancestors, who would have done anything for a byline and may as well have invented the maxim “whatever it takes”, today’s young reporter is a top-of-their-class, hyper-qualified graduate. Each has vied with a thousand peers for a job in which they must work harder and for less money than at any of the six law firms that made them competing offers.

Today, newspapers are staffed overwhelmingly by high acheivers who are more accountable for their work than ever. If MediaWatch was to give due prominence to the good as well as the bad, they’d need a lot more than fifteen minutes per week.

Journalism just happens to be one of those fields where little attention is given to any episode of brilliance but lots is gleefully made out of every single mistake. It means reporters get paired with used car salesmen for their trustworthiness and photographers may as well just sit with the paps.

What we have is the character and conduct of a global industry being tainted by the malfeasance of a handful. And when in the course of your work you inevitably make no shortage of political and commercial enemies, that stereotype is very readily exploited.

I was invited to meet with a couple of gents from that big Californian fruit company recently. They wanted to talk about the iPhone 4S, its iOS5 software, and in particular the new camera.

Having already used it myself for a few weeks, I doubted there would be much in the way of surprises for me. But wrong I was. It turns out, you see, that buried deep within the menus of its new software, and beyond the everyday notice of you and I, this iPhone is bringing photography to the blind.

While it doesn’t appear to be the very first attempt as such, it must be about the most effective and technologically impressive approach to that challenge so far. Using VoiceOver, it verbally describes to a visually impaired person the composition and contents of their viewfinder as they hold the phone up to take pictures.

It will tell them how many faces are in the frame, whether they are close, far away or in the mid-ground, and it informs them whether the shutter (home) button is to the left or right, depending on their phone’s orientation.

Here’s a video that probably demonstrates things better than I have explained them here. Or switch on VoiceOver and load the camera app to try it. (The video happens to have been created by someone also called Wade but it’s not me.)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdQVTToixWQ

You could blame the magazines and the brands that contrive the pictures, or you could blame the consumers and the readers for generating the demand, or you could criticise the models for validating it all with their participation. It’s a vicious circle in which probably none are without fault.

It’s easy to overstate the problem though. Gratuitous retouching and extreme enhancement is not condoned in the modern news media. If detected, editors take stern action because their journalistic credibility depends on it.

But in the world of entertainment it’s rife.

In women’s magazines digital manipulation goes well beyond fixing skin-tones and adjusting complexions, to the point that in 2010 Women’s Day completely manufactured a representation of a scene that never actually took place, by lifting composite parts from the internet and putting them together like a jigsaw puzzle.

While the average transgression is far less extreme, the social impact of course is not.

The media industries of most developed countries are largely self-regulated. It’s generally agreed that any move to impose heavy-handed government control is a can of worms best left untouched (although not by the proponents of the “Self-Esteem Act”).

In most cases it’s presumed that the prospect of being publicly shamed before your readers and your peers is the best remedy. (Whether that’s actually true or not is being debated right now.) But the problem with using this approach to temper egregious digital manipulation is that seldom do those readers or peers get to compare the “before” image to the “after” in order to establish how much has changed.

That’s where the recent work of some computer science academics might be useful. They’ve devised a way to quantify the changes applied to an image in post-production so that variation at the hand of a retoucher can be expressed on a scale of one to five. A publication could then either discretely display that number alongside each picture, or more likely just adopt a policy whereby they commit to staying within a certain spectrum of change across the publication.

For what’s presently about as regulated as the Wild West, that would be a start.

I notice CNN offloaded about a dozen photo staff this week. The powers that be put it down to the increasing quality of reader submitted pictures through iReport and the like. Well, I can’t say I believe them. It’s just far more likely to be a decision made on the basis of the cost of reader submitted content than the quality of it. But hey, it’s a press release and they’re saying what the market wants to hear I suppose.

We’re all well aware of the economic strife news media finds itself in the world over. But in light of the CNN announcement it’s worth reiterating how it got there: reduced audiences and depleting advertising revenues, with both factors attributable to the influences of the internet.

To say publishers look back at that point in the mid-nineties, when they decided to provide their online services at no cost to readers and at reduced cost to advertisers, and that they consider it a mistake is quite the understatement. And it accounts for the present day move to “premium” tablet publications and “pay-walls” for websites.

Well, someone should tell CNN. When you peddle a free or low-quality commodity audiences rightly wonder why they should ever pay for it. Likewise there’s less value in brand association for advertisers.

There’s a reason Qantas rarely issues free upgrades and never discounts them, and that Coles doesn’t give away its perishables at closing time, or that Apple pretty much never publicises discounts on its products. It’s to maintain the perception of value.

In journalism if you dismiss photographers and outsource their work to the public there’s an added problem. You might outsource the process but you can’t delegate your accountability. You just have to trust that stranger (the one you’re not paying) isn’t setting you up for a fall and as some of them will try to, you must constantly guard against it.

So a publisher is happy to settle for a poorer product and accept a hit to its brand, while constantly looking over its shoulder for scams and for hoaxes, hey?

CNN should cut the pretense and admit they’re just cutting costs.

It may well be easier to shoot a picture, but it hasn’t been made any simpler to produce a good one. Flickr proves that.

In Australia there are now more mobile telephones than there are people, and the latest boast cameras that outperform in many measures the hardware we paid tens of thousands for only a decade ago.

So what was once a mainly spectator sport has suddenly seen everyone invited onto the field for a kick. Photography, it seems, is more mainstream than ever.

Some worry that all of this means greater commercial competition, or that there’s a diluting effect which degrades the public’s perception of photography. Instead, I think there’s evidence that as more people take up photography in a semi-serious fashion, and as the photo community grows, it only benefits us all.

First, it makes things cheaper.

For instance, Canon can sell the semi-pro 5D, which is very competitive with its flagship 1Ds, but at about a third of its price. It did cannibalise sales of the top model for a long while, as professionals could no longer see the value in buying one, but that hardly mattered as the company sold so many of the former to new customers who would never have bought the latter, that it well and truly paid off.

It paid off for working photographers too, who saved thousands when they bought the 5D instead.

Then there’s Apple, which now pitches its professional photography software to hobbyists as the suggested natural progression from iPhoto. Increasing the user-base this way meant they could also reduce the price for everyone. And they did.

Probably the greatest boon, though, comes from consumer camera sales. For manufacturers that’s where the real money has always been. The more point-and-shoots they sell, the more money there is that flows into research and development for their professional divisions. The alternative would be more expensive pro equipment lines.

Second, passion is contagious.

You find the most optimistic photographers are usually dentists. It might be argued that’s precisely because they’re not doing it for a living, but the point remains that their enthusiasm rubs off.

There aren’t many camera clubs around anymore but their online equivalents are booming. The net is full of people eager to learn and to share what they’ve learnt.

Lastly, they’re our biggest supporters.

By and large, people who spend their money on expensive photography books, or who fill exhibition galleries, or who still buy newspapers and magazines because they appreciate the pictures, or who write letters to the editor to commend the photography rather than the words, or who donate to museums, and fund photo grants or competition prize money are not themselves professional photographers, but admirers of photography. They are the photo community.

And they are our biggest backers.

In the wake of the art investor movement we’re at a point where in some circles a photograph’s merit is based first and foremost on its predicted future yield. And the unintended consequence of massive price inflation is that it reduces our ability to decide for ourselves whether or not we actually like what we see.

Bluffed by the zeros, people think that if it’s so expensive it must be good, even if they can’t personally explain why. And to disagree would be to fly in the face of the experts.

In the case of Andreas Gursky’s recent record breaker, the $4.3 million Rhine II, the greatest single quality it could possibly boast of in my opinion is its price tag. It’s otherwise an unnoteworthy landscape with a transformative post production treatment and not much more.

But investors and their hangers-on will grasp at straws to find meaning to justify the obscenity. Christies called it “a dramatic and profound reflection on human existence and our relationship to nature on the cusp of the 21st century.” Gursky said it demonstrates the meaning of life. Seriously.

I wouldn’t want to presume your estimation of this picture to be as low as mine. You might actually like it. But the problem is the investment juggernaut and its huge prices have influenced our ability to actually decide this for ourselves. They have a vested interest in talking things up, and with that their profitability. A big price tag alone makes people afraid to admit that in all honesty they don’t actually see the emperor’s new clothes.

It’s not that a photographer hasn’t ever a theoretical right to make $4 million off the back of a picture. That’s good work if you can get it. It’s just that it should be possible for most people, even if personally unwilling to take out the necessary mortgage, to at least be able to acknowledge that there’s clearly something world-class, something epic and monumental about such a photograph; that it has some irrefutable cultural or historical value; that it’s clearly something very special.

Instead, the price tag often declares an end to the argument. And the net effect is investment bankers and captains of industry having a hold over art that galleries can no longer afford.

It reminds me of that Will Smith line about spending money you haven’t got, to buy things you don’t want, to impress people you don’t like. Except they of course have plenty of money.

Andreas Gursky’s Rhine II. It sold at auction for $4.3 million making it the world’s priciest photograph.