My photo tattooed on someone’s body
A few weeks ago I discovered a tweet from someone who was planning on using a photo of mine as the inspiration for a new tattoo. I was floored—what an honor. I reached out to the woman and asked if she wouldn’t mind sending me a photo of the finished work so I could post it to my blog. The appointment got delayed several times, and I forgot about the whole thing, that is until yesterday, when I got an email with a twitpic of the tattoo (inked by Ellen at Chameleon Tattoo & Body Piercing).
Mel Goldsipe’s pear leaf tattoo on the inside of her left forearm
And here’s the humble photo I took that it’s based on:
My photo smiling back at me
So I’m flipping through The Siem Reap Angkor Visitors Guide, (36th edition: Dec 2010 to Mar 2011), and exactly halfway through the magazine, there’s an ad for MekongBank. Half the ad is an image of one of the many smiling faces from the Bayon temple in Angkor Thom, portraying Buddha or Jayavarman VII—or both.
Siem Reap Angkor Visitors Guide, 36th edition, open to page 76
Something about the photo in the ad caught my eye. Almost immediately I realized, “That’s my photo”. Not “I took a photo like that” or “I happened to take a photo of that same face”. No, “I took that very photograph”—during my second trip to Cambodia in May 2003. It happens to be one of the few photos of my own that I’ve had printed. It was hanging in our foyer in San Francisco.
I’ll admit I wasn’t 100% sure. It’s hard to fathom how many photos have been taken of the Bayon temple’s smiling faces over the years. I was willing to allow that there was a chance, however slim, that someone had taken a remarkably similar photo.
Later that day, I looked back at my photos from May 2003, compared the ad to the original, and sure enough it was my photo exactly: uncropped, same perspective, same shadows, same sliver of blue sky in the top left corner. A dead match. The shear improbability of it blew me away. Here I was, in Siem Reap, stumbling upon a photo in an ad in a free tourist guide that I had taken during my first visit nearly 8 years ago. Does this sort of thing happen to anyone else?
My original photo of a smiling face at Bayon, taken in May 2003
How did it happen? After that trip to Cambodia, I put some of my best photos online, including this one, to share with friends and family. I made the original versions of the photos available for download since they were only 2 megapixel files. I also dedicated my initial photo galleries to the public domain, which helped some of them find their way into Wikipedia and which may have been where this photo was found. Or maybe it was just a swipe from Google Images, without regard for my permissive uncopyright. Who knows?
To make a long story short, we took the guide with us on our return trip to the Bayon and actually managed to find the very same smiling face I’d photographed in 2003. Even that seemed unlikely, given the roughly 150 surviving faces, each a little different. Only a few were visible at eye-level, which made the search easier. As a souvenir, I posed next to it with the magazine.
Priceless.
A smiling Bayon face and the ad that features its likeness
All Creative Work Is Derivative
I love this video by Nina Paley (of Sita Sings the Blues fame).
Public Domain Dilemmas
If I “dedicate” a digital photo to the public domain, have I dedicated the specific arrangement of pixels that make up that photo—or have I dedicated the more general visual image, the concept of that photo, if you will?
In the case of the former, can I change a single pixel, in a way that’s practically imperceptible to the human eye, but verifiably different (from a mathematical standpoint), and reclaim copyright of that photo (thus effectively removing it from the public domain)? Can I resize a photo and relicense it under different terms?
In the case of the latter, does public domain status follow any trivial transformation of that photo, such as resizing, cropping, or color adjustment? If I were to relicense that photo, would I be stealing or cheating the public? Would I be doing something “illegal”? Just as in the application of Fair Use, perhaps a legal determination would need to be made on the transformative nature of any new work based on public domain material.
If I dedicate something to the public domain, do I as the dedicator have any responsibility to ensure that it’s always publicly available, in perpetuity? This is a question I grappled with as I came to terms with the declining utility of my public domain photo galleries and my desire to merge them into my blog, where the content is currently licensed under a more restrictive (albeit admittedly still user-friendly) Creative Commons By-Attribution license.
If I remove the photos from the internet, does that have a demonstrable effect on the public domain? Does it matter if they were not all very good? If I possess a copy of some public domain material that someone wants, do they have any right to request that I give them a copy? Is it legal for someone to hoard the last copy of some public domain material? Is it moral?
When I first came around to the idea of licensing my photos under a more permissive scheme than copyright, I was immediately attracted to the concept of dedicating them to the public domain because it seemed to be the least restrictive means to give others unfettered access to my “creations”. Honestly I felt very fortunate to have traveled and seen what I did, and I wanted to share that with as many people as possible. It was only later after reading some things, that I realized in some ways the “public domain” is not all it’s cracked up to be.
The truth is, with my galleries having been on the internet, some for a period of over 6 years, numerous web crawlers have cached copies of both the images as well as the surrounding license information that indicated their public domain status. On one hand I don’t want to go through the trouble of indicating that certain resized images republished in new or existing blog posts were in the public domain (and not others). Partly because I’m not even sure if that is necessarily true. And on the other hand, I don’t want to get that email in the future where someone digs up a photo from my galleries lodged somewhere in the bowels of the Wayback Machine and calls bullshit on its new By-Attribution license.
In that case, I would just point them to this post. And honor the original public domain status.
At Free Culture 2008, sort of liveblogging
It’s been 3 years since I’ve spontaneously up and attended a conference semi-related to my sphere of interests, taking advantage of the Bay Area’s hotbeddedness. I read about “Free Culture 2008″ on Boing Boing this week. And now I am here. Just taking a pause for lunch and some internets.
So I’m going just haphazardly write down my notes from this point forward.
The Star-spangled Banner melody is based on The Anacreontick Song, an old British drinking song
DJ Ripley played some Baltimore Club Music samples (requires 2 breaks: sing sing and think)
Does sampling = infringement? WE DON’T KNOW.
OKAPI – remixing archeology
omeka.org – Museum CMS
rhizome.org – tagging artworks
Lessig is up next.
Importance of amateur culture (John Phillips Sousa)
Creative Commons announcing something on Oct 15
Wall Street Journal included a 2000 word excerpt form Larry’s latest book, Remix, BUT they titled it “In Defense of Piracy” much to his chagrin
Free Culture: it’s not about/for me – it’s for our culture
Lawyers spend all of their time questioning the law – don’t treat it as god’s given word
“Hegemony through verbosity” is the new security through obscurity
govtrack.us – you can download the raw data (like wikipedia)
oGosh (open government open source hacking)
A Thanksgiving dinner that has taken on a life of its own
I’d previously written in uncommon collaboration about an Irish artist living in Germany named Enda O’Donoghue who used a photo I’d taken as the basis for a pretty cool painting.
He just sent me an email letting me know the painting is on display in a Leipzig exhibition called Gedanken zur Revolution (Thoughts on Revolution). Rad!
Update: Enda just sent me a better shot of the painting hanging in the gallery.
My hummus recipe in print!
Two days ago I got an email from Mi Ae Lipe who told me she’d included my Roasted Garlic Hummus recipe in an “organic fruit-and-vegetable cookbook” called Tastes from Valley to Bluff: The Featherstone Farm Cookbook. She self-published it to “provide flood relief for some of the hard-hit southeastern Minnesota farms:”
A portion of the cookbook’s proceeds will go toward the Sow the Seeds Fund. In August 2007 many farms in southeast Minnesota, northeast Iowa and southwest Wisconsin, including Featherstone, were in ruins after storms and heavy flooding devastated the area.
Featherstone turns out to be a cooperative CSA, just like Capay Organic’s Farm Fresh to You that I’ve been writing about lately.
Anyway today I got my copy, and holy cow, it’s thick! Nearly 400 pages long. For a collaborative, self-published cookbook, I found the recipes contained within—organized by both season and produce, with lots of supplementary sidebars—to be quite professional. I’m looking forward to flipping through it for culinary inspiration.
Here’s how it looks:
And here’s how my recipe looks in print:
Thanks Mi Ae!
My small contribution to green building in Chapel Hill
Last August, as in August of 2006, I got an email out of the blue from a freelance graphic designer in North Carolina named Tony Burden. He was searching for some photos to use in a brochure for a green building development called Greenbridge and stumbled upon some pictures I’d taken in and around Chapel Hill (Fall, Winter, and Spring). He was writing to let me know how much he appreciated my images (and my having released them into the public domain), and that he’d chosen five to include in his design.
This is probably my favorite thing about the internet.
I held off on posting anything until after the project was formally announced—but I never got around to it because I’d just moved to San Francisco at the time. Fast forward to two days ago, and I got a surprise package in the mail. On top was a letter, part of which read:
Congratulations on the new camera! Your 10/29 post about the new Canon A570 IS was the kick-in-the-ass it finally took to get these out to you. And with the brochures, please find a check in nominal “appreciation” (although my appreciation is great) for use of your Chapel Hill images in the Greenbridge brochure.
Damn, that post struck a nerve! People are passionate about photography. Enclosed was a generous check, as well as several copies of his brochure featuring my photos. Thank you Tony.
