Coverage of the situation relating to the pending sale of the Polaroid Collection continues. Here’s a story from the September 22, 2009 issue of the Boston Globe, “Through the lens of time,” by Globe staffer Alex Beam. Beam quotes Sam Yanes, formerly of Polaroid and instrumental in the formation of the collection, as follows: “I […]
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Once again, I say to you: If you have work in either the U.S. or European Polaroid Collections, want to prevent the destruction of this world-famous archive via sale of its individual works at auction, and want to establish your claim to ownership of works you deposited in that collection on long-term loan or assert ongoing rights to access them, the time to act is now. Please read on, as there’s new cause for hope in this situation. […] The third category of works, those of particular concern to us here, are those that entered the collection via a sale, donation, or barter arrangement that prohibited commercial use, reserved for the photographers the right in perpetuity to borrow the works for exhibition and publication purposes, did not specify transfer of ownership, and otherwise contain explicitly or implicitly encumbering language. Here too the court should determine this by examination of the relevant contracts and letters of agreement covering those works, whose sale to buyers not bound by the initial understandings between the Polaroid Corporation and the photographers would in fact constitute breach of contract. […] Martins’s contract stipulated digitally unaltered images (beyond the minimal tweaking described in the above memo), and he repeatedly asserted to Times staffers — including the writer of the accompanying Times Magazine article, several editors, and the fact checker at the magazine — that his images conformed to those guidelines. Where I come from, we call that lying, when its source is a photographer commissioned to document the real estate bust. Reading Martins’s own “annotations” of his now-controversial images, it seems clear that he felt free to exercise extreme license in montaging and altering his illustrations, rationalizing this activity with a logic and vocabulary far more commonplace in the discourse around creative photography than in that related to photojournalism and documentary work. […] |
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Fish Story
I hasten to point out a fundamental conceptual error that Bennett and his colleagues have made, as exemplified by this last statement. Their subject, said dead salmon, was not “perceiving humans.” It was perceiving photographs of humans. The relationship between a photograph of a thing and the thing itself is indexical at best, and fraught with complexities and qualifications. Clearly Bennett et al need to read more theory of photography. On a positive note, Bennett and his group also scanned a pumpkin and a Cornish hen (both certifiably deceased) with no resulting critical commentary. What a relief. . . . […]