The Photographer & The Burglar
Copyright David Rann 2013
I feel a bit of spleen-venting coming on…
If there’s one thing that makes me choke on my choccie digestive, it’s the seemingly endless Facebook status updates by photographers saying “Here’s a sneak preview of Fred and Hilda’s wedding today at…”
Aaaaargh! There’s a reason why traditionally, newspapers don’t print wedding photos until about a month after the ceremony: because you are announcing to the world (including your friendly neighbourhood villains) that the happy couple’s house is likely to be unoccupied for a fortnight and therefore a great target for burglary!
Include information about the wedding venue and even the least tech-savvy crook can often access information about the couple’s name and thereby help to locate their home address. If newspapers did what these photographers are doing, your local rag would become a kind of home-shopping catalogue for burglars. I’m imagining a couple of housebreakers sitting at home in their striped sweaters thumbing through Dullsville Weekly and deciding on that evening’s burglary schedule.
Stop it!!
And even leaving aside the security issue, I would NEVER show wedding images to the wider world before being approved by the couple! What if you post an image online for the whole world to see FOREVER and then find that’s it’s one that the couple absolutely hate? Remember who’s paying you!
Spleen vented. Nuff said.
Tumblr: Thief or Pirate? A Cautionary Tale
Here’s a nice story to warm your seasonal cockles – not.
Imagine this: a friend emails you and sends you a link to an image on popular site Tumblr saying “This photo just looks like one of yours!”. So you look, and it is indeed one of your photographs, except the one that has been posted has been (badly) converted to black and white, and your logo has been clumsily removed.
You are understandably a tad disgruntled and contact the person who posted the image as well as host site Tumblr to complain and… NOTHING IS DONE!.
The stolen and apparently “photoshopped by a chimp” version of Andy Watson’s original image.
So a bastardized version of one of your own carefully crafted images, of the sort that you as a professional photographer sells to various magazines, has been used without your permission on a major website – and, you are given to understand, may also have been submitted to publications by the person who posted it, passing it off as their own.
Well this is what happened to one of Birmingham’s best contemporary fashion and music photographers Andy Watson of DRW Images (http://www.drw-images.co.uk/ and http://www.facebook.com/drw.images#!/pages/Drw-Images/280703695157).
My copy from Andy Watson’s original image
By the very nature of Tumblr with its re-posting and recycling of images and information, there’s no way of knowing exactly who is responsible for the hatchet job on Andy’s image, but this particular person seems happy enough to sit back and allow praise to flood in for an image that isn’t theirs with little or no attempt to establish its provenance which is just as bad in my book.
In the spirit of fair play, and as a gesture against increasingly widespread copyright theft on sites such as Tumblr – perhaps you would join me in contacting the thief of this image by following this link and leaving an appropriate comment…http://cookiepuffy.tumblr.com/post/18445061746
Thanks to Andy Watson for bringing this to our attention and for permission to use these images.
A Permit To Take Pictures In The Jewellery Quarter? Really?
A man is viciously beaten by police when they mistake his AK47 for a Sony DSLR. Just kidding, but you get the idea.
Just when you thought it was once again safe to venture onto the city streets with your camera, here’s yet another cautionary tale about over-officious and misguided authoritarian numptiness…
A few weeks ago I was in Birmingham’s leafy St. Paul’s Square on the edge of the Jewellery Quarter with about a dozen of my students on a one day “Introduction to Digital Photography” course. This is a regular feature of a regular course and we are rarely there longer than twenty minutes or so. On this occasion one of the group was standing in the square photographing up the street, experimenting with aperture settings for different depth-of-field. He was soon approached by a WPC who asked him what he was doing. At this point I went over and asked if there was a problem. The ensuing conversation went something like this…
WPC: Have you had permission to take photographs here?
Me: Erm, no. I didn’t think we needed permission to take photographs here.
WPC: Well you do.
Me: Why?
WPC: Ah, you don’t know who owns these buildings. I know because it’s my job to know. I know because I’ve been a police officer here for 14 years. For all you know, some of these buildings might belong to Americans.
Me: And is that a problem?
WPC: Ooh yes, what with everything that’s going on at the moment, with the Olympics and that.
Me: Isn’t that next year? And in London?
WPC: We’re always getting complaints from shopkeepers in the Jewellery Quarter about people taking photographs of their shops.
Me: But there are no shops here..?
WPC: That man was taking pictures of those buildings there. I saw him.
The man in my group: That building? Why can’t I take pictures of that building?
WPC: You don’t know who owns these buildings. I know because it’s my job to know. I know because I’ve been a police officer here for 14 years..
The man in my group: (reaches into his pocket and pulls out a key) Would you like to come in and have a look around?
Turns out this man was a key-holder for the building (which I daren’t specify for fear of breaching anti-terrorist legislation). That seemed to shut her up, briefly. But I gave up. No arguing with someone who’s been a police officer in the area for 14 years – even if she has a somewhat (alarmingly) patchy grasp of the laws of the land. We headed back to the studio (we’d pretty much finished there anyway).
What is it with Birmingham officialdom? You might remember a similar run-in my group had with a “Park Ranger” at Cannon Hill Park in the summer. This is getting to be a very tedious and slightly worrying trend. I don’t understand – do West Midlands Police think that Al Qaida are sending out groups of trainee photographers to photograph Birmingham office buildings in preparation for an Olympics-based attack a year hence? Do they think Al Qaida haven’t heard of Google Street View?
There is no signage anywhere in this area (I’ve looked) prohibiting the use of cameras – although there are plenty of police cameras in operation 24/7. Presumably, by extension, we are not allowed to photograph any building in the UK: City landmarks? West Country cottages? beach huts? stately homes? my next door neighbour’s house? After all, these might also belong to Americans… or jewellers.
In a nice little post-script to this story, I had a magistrate on one of these courses this week and I told her about the incident. She said “What? She didn’t know what she was talking about!” And of course she didn’t.
In retrospect, I should have brandished my “Bust card“, downloaded from the “I’m A Photographer Not A Terrorist” website. If you’re thinking of heading into Birmingham with your camera, you’d better get yours!
http://photographernotaterrorist.org/
So You Still Want To Be A Wedding Photographer..?
You may by now be labouring under the misapprehension that I have something of a downer on wedding photography – not the case, I promise. But I thought you might like to hear about this American law-suit brought against a wedding photographer by the groom a full SIX YEARS AFTER the wedding.
New York fomer groom Todd J. Remis brought the action against H&H Photographers, claiming not only the $4100 for the original cost of the photography but also an additional $48,000 to re-stage the wedding, even though the couple are NO LONGER TOGETHER! And all because the photographer missed an estimated 15 minutes of the wedding.
Here’s the details from the New York Times:
“The photographers had missed the last dance and the bouquet toss, the groom, Todd J. Remis of Manhattan, said.
But what is striking, said the studio that took the pictures, is that Mr. Remis’s wedding took place in 2003 and he waited six years to sue. And not only has Mr. Remis demanded to be repaid the $4,100 cost of the photography, he also wants $48,000 to recreate the entire wedding and fly the principals to New York so the celebration can be re-shot by another photographer.
Re-enacting the wedding may pose a particular challenge, the studio pointed out, because the couple divorced and the bride is believed to have moved back to her native Latvia.
Although Justice Doris Ling-Cohan of State Supreme Court in Manhattan dismissed most of the grounds for the lawsuit, like the “infliction of emotional distress,” she has allowed the case to proceed to determine whether there was indeed a breach of contract. But she displayed a good deal of amusement about the lawsuit’s purpose in an opinion in January that quoted lyrics from the Barbra Streisand classic “The Way We Were.”
“This is a case in which it appears that the ‘misty watercolor memories’ and the ‘scattered pictures of the smiles … left behind’ at the wedding were more important than the real thing,” the judge wrote. “Although the marriage did not last, plaintiff’s fury over the quality of the photographs and video continued on.”
Mr. Remis is suing H & H Photographers, a 65-year-old studio known fondly among thousands of former and current Bronx residents because it chronicled their weddings, bar mitzvahs and communions.
One of the two founders, Curt Fried, escaped Nazi-occupied Vienna in September 1939 as a 15-year-old and was drafted into the United States Army, where he learned to shoot pictures assisting cameramen along the legendary Burma Road supply line to China during World War II. Mr. Fried recalled that in the late 1940s, Arthur Fellig, the celebrated street photographer known as Weegee, twice sought work at the studio when he needed money, but was turned down because he did not own a suit.
In November 2003, Mr. Remis, an equity research analyst, and his fiancée, Milena Grzibovska, stepped into the H & H studio, which was then in Riverdale, met with Mr. Fried and signed a contract to have photographs and videotape taken of their wedding the next month — on Dec. 28 — for $4,100.
It was a small party, with fewer than 40 guests, at Castle on the Hudson in Tarrytown. Photographs show a cheerful bride and groom surrounded by delighted relatives, including Ms. Grzibovska’s mother, Irina, and her sister Alina, who traveled from Latvia.
But a month after the wedding, when Mr. Remis returned to the studio to look over the proofs, he complained that the three-person crew had missed the last 15 minutes — the last dance and the bouquet toss. He noted in a deposition last July that the employees at H & H did not respond in a courtly fashion.
“I remember being yelled at more than I have ever been yelled at before,” Mr. Remis said.
In his lawsuit, he also complained that the photographs were “unacceptable as to color, lighting, poses, positioning” and that a video, which he had expected to record the wedding’s six hours, was only two hours long.
“I need to have the wedding recreated exactly as it was so that the remaining 15 percent of the wedding that was not shot can be shot,” he testified.
Mr. Fried, now 87, chuckles at this idea: “He wants to fly his ex-wife back and he doesn’t even know where she lives.”
Mr. Remis, who said at his deposition that he has not been employed since 2008, and his lawyer, Frederick R. McGowen, did not return messages left on their phones. Ms. Grzibovska did not respond to a message left through her Facebook page. The next court hearing is scheduled for Thursday.
Mr. Fried said Mr. Remis left the studio in 2004 with 400 proofs — essentially small photographs used for selecting a few dozen photographs for the album; Mr. Remis claims “the office kept everything.” But a 2004 magazine published by Mr. Remis’s alma mater, Bowdoin College, which is also online, displays a photograph of the bride and groom in a feature on alumni weddings. Mr. Fried said it was a photograph his firm took.
The couple separated around 2008 and their divorce, which Mr. Remis contends was amicable, was finalized in 2010. Mr. Remis sued in 2009, just before the statute of limitation was about to expire, according to Mr. Fried.
Mr. Remis testified that he wanted photographs of the wedding, even if it ended in divorce and even if Mr. Fried contended he already had them.
“It was unfortunate in its circumstances,” he said, “but we are very much happy with the wedding event and we would like to have it documented for eternity, for us and our families.”
Mr. Fried retired in 2004 and turned his half of the business over to his son Dan, who now operates the studio with Lawrence Gillet, a son of the other founder, from a loft in Irvington, in Westchester County.
Dan Fried said that the costs of defending the lawsuit had already matched the amount sought by Mr. Remis and that it was hurting his business’s bottom line. He said the case was “an abuse of the legal system.”
Mr. Remis’s lawyer works for Goodwin Procter, where Mr. Remis’s father, Shepard M. Remis, is a litigation partner. The younger Mr. Remis has testified that he is paying his lawyer himself.
Curt and Dan Fried are paying their lawyer, Peter Wessel, themselves, they said, and the costs — $50,000 — the time the suit has taken and the distress have taken a toll.
“I had a good life, thank God,” Curt Fried said, “and at the end of my life this hits me in the face.”
Phew! Couldn’t happen in the UK though, could it? Or could it? If you’re a photographer, you NEED professional indemnity insurance!
The piece in the NYT – http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/03/nyregion/suit-against-photographer-seeks-re-creation-of-wedding-after-divorce.html?_r=2
Magnum Photographer Arrested in Black Country!
On Tuesday I attended a lecture by one of (I reckon) the world’s most influential living photographers – Martin Parr – at the University of Wolverhampton. Parr has recently completed the first stage of a project documenting The Black Country in his own inimitable (though many try) style. The results of his forays into the wilds of Sandwell were exhibited at The Public, West Bromwich’s over-priced, over-ambitious and chronically under-utilised “white elephant” arts centre.
From The Black Country" by Martin Parr
During this very interesting lecture, Parr showed rarely-seen examples of his very early work, as well as his colection of Saddam Hussain watches(!) and spoke very candidly about his journey in photography. Here’s my favourite snippet of wisdom from the man…
When asked how much he cropped his images he said “I crop with my legs. That’s what they’re for”.
Parr made it quite clear that some of the images that he shot twenty or so years ago, such as those from “The Last Resort” about fading british seaside resorts, and especially those that feature children on the beach, he simply wouldn’t be allowed to shoot nowadays.
From "The Last Resort" by Martin Parr
I sneaked a bit of footage during the lecture where he explains this…
I asked him whether this had had an adverse effect on the way he works. He replied that (and I’m paraphrasing of course) that on the whole, people were still very amenable about being photographed in the street, although there was one incident while photographing “The Black Country” that he was arrested in Wednesbury for photographing in a public area where children were present. Parr was, obviously, well within his rights and was eventually “un-arrested” and given an apology.
So it seems that even famous Magnum photographers can fall foul of over-zealous public guardians. There’s hope for us all.
Martin Parr’s website – http://www.martinparr.com/index1.html
The Public – http://www.thepublic.com/
fotofiliablog 