Plagiarism: Not just for words and music

David Segal has an interesting article up on Slate called "Can Photographers be Plagiarists?"

The father-and-son photography team of Horst and Daniel Zielske caused a stir in September when their show, "Megalopolis Shanghai," opened at MKG, a museum in Hamburg, Germany. But it wasn't the sort of stir any artist could relish. Another German photographer, Peter Bialobrzeski, accused the pair of ripping off two images from his highly acclaimed series "Neon Tigers"—right down to the luminous, Blade Runner-like glow that was the "Neon Tigers" signature.

I'm not sure why Segal phrases the title as a question, because the answer is clearly "Yes." He writes that the issue is made complicated by the fact that artists pay homage to each other and that a photo is a record of a scene which is accessible to all, but he illustrates them with examples that don't prove his point.

Plagiarism is a matter of intent. If you deliberately tailor a photo to look like another photo, that's plagiarism. The example of the Zielskes may not be clear-cut, but it doesn't disprove the possibility.

At Business 2.0 we have had occasion to hire photographers to reproduce an existing photo, with changes to make it suit our purposes. In those cases, we have gotten permission from the original photographer and paid him for the idea. Had we not, we would have a lawsuit on our hands, and using the example of Steichen and Stieglitz shooting the Flatiron would not have helped.

The most fascinating part of Segal's article is the example of two cheeky artists who straight-out photographed other artist's photographs. Yay for conceptual art! [Warning: the second link leads to an image of a naked 10-year-old. But it's Brooke Shields, so it's art, not porn.]