Danziger Gallery Exhibits "AI-generated color version" of Ansel Adams' "Moonrise, Hernadez, New Mexico" at AIPAD

[DREW WILEY]

Well, you wouldn't want anyone digging around to find out who is actually buried there. Maybe some other photographers who never got due credit for their work before it was plagiarized.

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

Alan - if people want creative visual inspiration based on prior works, all they have to do is look at a photo or painting. There's nothing particularly creative about pirating it and then adding a few superficial amenities in order to justify calling it your own production. This is NOT like Bach writing down music intending it to be played by posterity over and over again. Yeah, AA, himself a musician, likened the negative to a score, and the print to the performance; but whose print?

And AA hasn't been dead for 70 years already, if you want to factor copyrights. If you factor only a 50 year buffer from when he died in 1984, according to the former convention, that still doesn't give wiggle room for what just transpired with the colorization prank. I remember that date well. I was contacted by a curator for a retrospective timed right after his death, and had a number of my own prints side by side with his, including, if I remember correctly, a very large early Moonrise print, which was actually somewhat soft in its look.

All your arguments do not change the fact that the photo is in the Public Domain. It cannot be copyright-protected again as much as you feel it should. There are millions of photos in the Public Domain. Would we have to check with you to know if it;s acceptable to reinterpret or not? What other photographers besides Ansel Adams do you feel deserve this special extra-legal privilege? Am I one of them?

Secondly, others don;t have to check with you to verify their reinterpretation meets your artistic standards before it is published. If you don't like the results, don't buy it. Others may be interested.

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

Clearly you equate right/wrong with the law. In this case, the Copyright legislation.
They overlap, but they are not the same.
I would argue that Anne Geddes' work is fundamentally a wrong against all of our sensibilities.
Others may argue the same for other's work.
But that doesn't make them illegal.

I usually play devil's advocate. After all these years of posting, I thought you'd pick up on this by now. When everyone is going one way, I go the other. It;s also a good method to determine if arguments meet logic and other truths and where weaknesses in our arguments are, both mine and yours.

I too admire Ansel; as a landscape photographer, he;s one of my heroes. But there are ethical as well as legal issues in the arguments not to reinterpret his photo that's in the Public Domain. You miss out on art and techniques that provide additional meaning and enjoyment to society. YOu may not like the colorization, but it;s actually very interesting to see what the scene looks like in the original. I mentioned earlier how hundred-year-old BW movies have been colorized to show what cities actually looked like to the people alive at the time. These things have value. It's why we limit the years of copyright protection.

 

[Don_ih]

the photo is in the Public Domain

I don't think anyone here can state with certainty one way or the other about that.

Anyway, photos get chopped up and rearranged all the time for all kinds of purposes. That's not even a big deal at this point. Taking a b&w photo and colouring it and claiming it's something distinct (copyrighted or not) is the problem in this instance. The colourized photo is still Ansel Adams' photo. It isn't AI's photo or the gallery's photo. It doesn't even matter if people like that it shows the real colours of the scene (if it even does anything close to that). It's a matter of what that particular thing is. As in, when you look at it, what is it that you're looking at? Ansel Adams' photo with some coloured felt-tip marker on it.

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

I don't think anyone here can state with certainty one way or the other about that.

Anyway, photos get chopped up and rearranged all the time for all kinds of purposes. That's not even a big deal at this point. Taking a b&w photo and colouring it and claiming it's something distinct (copyrighted or not) is the problem in this instance. The colourized photo is still Ansel Adams' photo. It isn't AI's photo or the gallery's photo. It doesn't even matter if people like that it shows the real colours of the scene (if it even does anything close to that). It's a matter of what that particular thing is. As in, when you look at it, what is it that you're looking at? Ansel Adams' photo with some coloured felt-tip marker on it.

So now we have to check with you as well as Drew to see if we can reinterpret a photo in the Public Domain and if it's artistic enough to be published? Anyone else want to be on that committee? We'll call it the Copyright Brigade.

 

[DREW WILEY]

It's doubly offensive. First, by bringing Ai into the equation. That is already in the process of destroying a lot of graphics arts careers; plenty of commercial photographers will suffer next. So don't expect people to have an exactly friendly response to it in the alleged arts fields either. Trying to claim the spotlight for being the first in the community to contract the bubonic plague doesn't exactly constitute bragging rights.

Second, it's just a blatant ripoff. Nothing really there that a clever 13-year old couldn't do in ordinary Photoshop, given the scan. Posing that in a fine-art dealership context at a high price just makes it more obnoxious. Has nothing to do with copyrights; it's just plain a tacky thing to do. It's neither a clever pun, nor an elegant image; it's just another oversized postcard given that treatment.

 

[MurrayMinchin]

... YOu may not like the colorization, but it;s actually very interesting to see what the scene looks like in the original...

It does nothing of the sort. It is a colourized version of a heavily dodge & burned B&W print.

If a colour photo of the scene was taken at the same time as the original and a straight ‘proof print’ of it was made, it would be severely blocked up in the shadows or have blown out high values.

The original scene would look nothing like Ansel’s print.

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

It does nothing of the sort. It is a colourized version of a heavily dodge & burned B&W print.

If a colour photo of the scene was taken at the same time as the original and a straight ‘proof print’ of it was made, it would be severely blocked up in the shadows or have blown out high values.

The original scene would look nothing like Ansel’s print.

Now we;'re drifting from Public Domain rights and ethics back to whether how much Photoshopping is acceptable, an argument long having been debated. Most photos today are dressed up to look better than the original scene. Skies are swapped and cloned all the time. Nothing new with that and that has nothing to do with copyright protection.

 

[Arthurwg]

I think Jackson Pollock had an amount of genius.

If you look at Pollock's pre-drip early work it was rather horrendous, even though he studied with Thomas Hart Benton. If there's any genius there, it's coming up with a strategy that compensated for his lack of talent and was compatible with or even aided by his alcoholism.

 

[MurrayMinchin]

Photo poached from Ansel Adams Gallery website: https://articles.anseladams.com/a-legend-in-light/

These are presumably early and later interpretations, so a straight print at max black time from the original (reportedly very thin) negative would be horrible. A colour photo would have looked nothing like the later print...Danziger's colour version "to see what Ansel saw" is a bogus flail.

 

[MattKing]

Now we;'re drifting from Public Domain rights and ethics back to whether how much Photoshopping is acceptable, an argument long having been debated. Most photos today are dressed up to look better than the original scene. Skies are swapped and cloned all the time. Nothing new with that and that has nothing to do with copyright protection.

No.
The magic in Moonrise is a tripartite combination:
1) the original scene, including its lighting;
2) AA's visualization at the time of exposure, including the (very rushed) decisions on exposure; and
3) AA's realization of that immediate vision, in concert with his judgment as well as the skills and techniques he employed to bring the combination into various final forms - the variety being because like any other performative art, the performer's take on the piece evolves over time.
It is that multi-faceted and temporally extended process that brought forth many different prints which are/were subject to copyright.
It is revelatory that the copyright protection of what we view as "Moonrise" begins at the time of printing, not at the time of camera exposure. The negative itself arguably has its own copyright protection.

 

[Don_ih]

So now we have to check with you as well as Drew

No. That photo isn't a reinterpretation of anything. It's the same photo - just a different print of it.

Imagine this: you saw the newly colourized image that adorns the gallery wall in a news program on a b&w television. Would you be looking at a "reinterpretation" of it, then? No. You'd be looking at the photo, just not seeing the colours. The presentation would be lacking that aspect but you'd still consider it the same photo.

Colour tv programs didn't become transformed when people watched them on b&w tvs.

Colourized movies don't become transformed by the addition of colour. The same movie - just in colour.

 

[MattKing]

@BrianShaw ,
I was lumping all those individual components into "the skills and techniques he employed to bring the combination into various final forms".
But it doesn't hurt to break them out.

 

[DREW WILEY]

Murray - even the older version was dodged and burned quite a bit. But lacking suitable VC papers, how could he increase the contrast in the foreground? So he partially intensified the neg. After that, he could print the whole thing more boldly, and at the same time, darken the sky enough that its blotchiness would be concealed. Water bath development was not ideal for getting an even effect; and the result of that is what he had to contend with.

But you are correct. Although a later example was evidently scanned and then colorized, neither version necessarily matched what AA would have seen in actual color fashion with his own eyes at the time. That was not the point anyway. He saw the potential of the scene as a black and white print instead, although it took him quite awhile to settle on his preferred rendering of it.

Sometimes I found his inky sky work a bit too theatrical. He might be especially famous for that kind of presentation, but more often, his approach was more subtle. I just want to point out that lots of his negs weren't all that good. His famous "Gates of the Valley" Yosemite negative had undergone water damage during his studio fire. I just mentioned development evenness issues in skies, which affected certain well-known images. I've even watched a retoucher condemned to Purgatory spotting out the silhouette of a mosquito which got inside his bellows and landed on the negative itself right before he pressed the shutter, in a well-known Alaska image. Then there were those early days when he changed out his filmholders inside a linty sleeping bag. And having seen a number of his bigger "mural" images up close, they weren't sharp at all compared with today's film, lenses, and precision camera gear, but rather fuzzy and grainy.

 

[Stephen Benskin]

Conceptual art says: the idea itself is the artwork. The object is just evidence of the idea. While that might be a bit of an extreme view, art is about communication and as words give form to thought, the art object gives form to concept. Sherri Levine's After Walker Evans wasn't about making copies of his photographs, the art was the reasoning why she did it and what she was communicating through it. Of course, art includes all the trappings associated with the artist and the work, and with photography, what is associated with a specific print of a image. What's interesting is we especially should know better than most as our own field of photography has long been regarded as the poor step child of art.

Sontag repeatedly points out that photography is easier to do than painting, drawing, or sculpture because the camera does much of the work. She argues that photography creates good pictures by accident far more often than other arts. The machine can outperform the operator. A photograph can be “a work of art without the intervention of the artist.” She notes that photography “undermines the very idea of art” because it challenges the notion that art must come from mastery, intention, and hand‑made craft. It destabilizes old definitions of art and authorship, which is good as it democratizes image‑making and changes how culture defines creativity.

I asked Google what is considered transformative and one of the definitions is:
Adds new expression, meaning, or message rather than copying the original’s purpose.(e.g., parody, critique, analysis). From Lawyer Monthly. Danziger's version does this as does other images posted on this thead. In my opinion, it's not about colorizing or copying an image, it's about AI making choices independent of the artist which questions the nature of art and technology. That is what validates it. It's just a few steps down the road from the questions Sontag raised about art and photography and expanding the meaning of creativity.

 

[Don_ih]

The following is a close up of the scan at anseladams.com. Does the AI version have a thumbprint?

 

[DREW WILEY]

Doubtful, Stephen. I've spent decades trying to render certain hues in print, ones which any skilled watercolorist could mix in minutes. Photography is by nature selective instead. It can take a lot of time and work to find the foot the silver slipper actually fits. But that's also what's so appealing about it, the hunt itself. Modern digital printing hasn't done anything to change that. If anything, the palette and gamut of inkjet is inferior to the capacity of modern color film and optical printing paper. Nuanced results require more dedication, or more refined printing techniques like DT, which hardly fits into the "want it yesterday" mentality of most people today.

All that other stuff is just a cop-out, an end run around the real challenge. Who cares about all the "art-speak" garble. Ai can parrot it, but can't feel anything itself. And people can parrot other people's work without any real depth of the original sensitivity. I don't need a bacterial analysis of recycled hamburger if it smells rotten to begin with. How about a little common sense here?

 

[DREW WILEY]

That's no thumbprint, but a Newton ring pattern, probably from the scanning step. It's all over the whole thing. I have seen finger and thumb prints in a few AA images if one closely looks, since less than ideal retouching sometimes draws attention itself. And sometimes N-ring patterns appear in published images if one looks closely. The presses tried to control that with offset powder, but it wasn't always completely successful. And of course, we sometimes have ring issues with glass neg carriers. But in this instance, the scanner would be the culprit.

 

[BrianShaw]

@BrianShaw ,
I was lumping all those individual components into "the skills and techniques he employed to bring the combination into various final forms".
But it doesn't hurt to break them out.

It doesn’t hurt to cluster them either. Peace!

 

[Dr. no]

And having seen a number of his bigger "mural" images up close, they weren't sharp at all compared with today's film, lenses, and precision camera gear, but rather fuzzy and grainy.

I always attributed that to cheap printing (especially compared to the methods AA collaborated/supervised himself) for these government-paid, public domain prints. I just went googling and there were some (eg. Taos pueblo gates) that were quite nice and sharp, but overall they look like contract-deadline work compared to our favorites.

Adds new expression, meaning, or message rather than copying the original’s purpose.(e.g., parody, critique, analysis).

That's a pretty loose definition.

Conceptual art says: the idea itself is the artwork. The object is just evidence of the idea. While that might be a bit of an extreme view, art is about communication and as words give form to thought, the art object gives form to concept. Sherri Levine's After Walker Evans wasn't about making copies of his photographs, the art was the reasoning why she did it and what she was communicating through it

I like the definition of art where the piece can explain itself without a booklet or a lawyer. Her work looks like a facsimile of Walker Evans' work (which is what it is) rather than an incisive condemnation of originality and patriarchal blah (which has to be explained external to the "work". Does the controversy of claiming the images as her own work accentuate the message she wants to communicate, or ridicule it? Matter of opinion.

Sometimes the message can be "flowers are pretty". Symbolic logic reduces this extremity of conceptual art to "this female artist concurs that this male artist says flowers are pretty". Or "poverty is bad" in this case.

To make it even more meta, there is a multimedia artist named Michael Mandiberg with an identical pair of webpages (in addition to his own original and transformative work) named:

AfterWalkerEvans.com
aftersherrielevine.com

I am always glad to live in a city where there are so many active artists doing original, as in, painting/crafting/etc works on their own from scratch, not just sampling images and pixels from elsewhere. Yes, we all have pictures of beautiful skies, adobe and chamisa, but they are ours!

 

[reddesert]

All your arguments do not change the fact that the photo is in the Public Domain. It cannot be copyright-protected again as much as you feel it should. There are millions of photos in the Public Domain. Would we have to check with you to know if it;s acceptable to reinterpret or not? What other photographers besides Ansel Adams do you feel deserve this special extra-legal privilege? Am I one of them?

Ansel Adams's name and reputation aren't in the public domain, however. If the gallery had posted an altered version of the photo without mentioning Ansel Adams it would be slightly less offensive, but using his name to gain publicity (using his name for commercial purposes) brings it into clear conflict with the rights and interests of the Ansel Adams Trust. This is an example of the right of publicity, also known as personality rights: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights
The law varies in different countries and in the US on the state level, but for example, in California, "The right of publicity shares characteristics of a property right and as such is transferable to the person's heirs after their death," quote from the linked Wikipedia article.

 

[Don_ih]

It's all over the whole thing.

It's not over the whole thing. It's just right there. It's supposedly a scan or photo of a print. That area I cropped would not be very big on the negative. That would be a very selective set of Newton rings. Not impossible, but very coincidental for something that is the size of a thumb print. Anyway, I thought it was humorous.

And having seen a number of his bigger "mural" images up close, they weren't sharp at all compared with today's film, lenses, and precision camera gear, but rather fuzzy and grainy.

The idea of someone looking up close at a mural print and condemning it as it fuzzy and grainy is pretty humorous, too.

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

No. That photo isn't a reinterpretation of anything. It's the same photo - just a different print of it.

Imagine this: you saw the newly colourized image that adorns the gallery wall in a news program on a b&w television. Would you be looking at a "reinterpretation" of it, then? No. You'd be looking at the photo, just not seeing the colours. The presentation would be lacking that aspect but you'd still consider it the same photo.

Colour tv programs didn't become transformed when people watched them on b&w tvs.

Colourized movies don't become transformed by the addition of colour. The same movie - just in colour.

Photos in the Public Domain don't require a reinterpretation, nor do they have to be transformative. You can copy, print, and sell the exact same photograph with or without change. A few posters above have already added their own changes, all legal. Some of them are spoofs, all legal. Ansel Adams fans may find them offensive, but that's life in the Public Domain. Ansel's photos have no more proection then yours or mine. He doesn't get any special favors or rights because he's well known. Copyright rules apply to everyone equally. It would be unethical as well as illegal to have a two-tier system of protection.

 

[Don_ih]

A few posters above have already added their own changes, all legal. Some of them are spoofs

A few posters - mostly me.

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

Ansel Adams's name and reputation aren't in the public domain, however. If the gallery had posted an altered version of the photo without mentioning Ansel Adams it would be slightly less offensive, but using his name to gain publicity (using his name for commercial purposes) brings it into clear conflict with the rights and interests of the Ansel Adams Trust. This is an example of the right of publicity, also known as personality rights: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights
The law varies in different countries and in the US on the state level, but for example, in California, "The right of publicity shares characteristics of a property right and as such is transferable to the person's heirs after their death," quote from the linked Wikipedia article.

I;m not a IP lawyer so I don;t know. First off, can later versions of Adams pciture be copyrighted separately? I don;t imagine it could unless it is itself transformative. Otherwise the copyright applies to the original negative and subsequent prints. Any lawyers out there?

Regarding giving his name next to the picture you're selling, again, any lawyers out there?