More Vivian Maier

[Sirius Glass]

An extreme form of obsessive compulsive disorder [OCD] is compulsive disorder obsessive [CDO]. That OCD which is so bad that the person suffering from it is so compulsive that all words must be alphabetized.

 

[16:9]

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's property. Thou shalt not steal.

If that's good enough for God, it should be good enough for us. I'm sure you didn't mean it in the harsh terms I stated it, so I apologize for that. My point is that copyrights and photos are property like anything else. We shouldn't be going around taking what belongs to others by claiming it's in the public domain. In the US, copyrights and patents are actually guaranteed in the US constitution, so important our founders thought they were. It's bad enough photographers are getting paid peanuts for their work today in many cases, Do we really want to take away what's left?

“The living know they will die but the dead know nothing at all, nor do they have any more reward. Their love and their hate and their jealousy have already perished, and they no longer have any share in what is done under the sun. Go . . . enjoy life . . . whatever your hands find to do, do with all your might, for there is no work, nor planning, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, nor copyright royalties in the grave, where you are going.”

The law stands in very different positions on this issue around the world, but commonly it aims to legislate greed, which will never generate a fair outcome. There's no basis for extending individual copyright beyond death, beyond greed. You can inherit a chair; you can't inherit an idea. Ideas are personal and unique: only the artist deserves to benefit from them. What right does a son have to 'own' the intellectual property of their father? It's never, truly, theirs. A free ride on its coat-tails is appealing, but wrong: hypocritical and avaricious. Conversely, an infinitely rich public domain seems to me a hallmark of a grown-up civilisation that believes in education - or at least one that assigns a higher priority to the creative enrichment of humanity than the personal, financial enrichment of undeserving relatives.

Poor unconscious Vivian finds herself embroiled in a culture war about who's getting wealthy from her pictures, which only illuminates a core problem infecting the arts, science and humanities alike: that the culture values personal gain over collective advancement. Unless that changes, self-defeating conflict will dominate all human endeavour, and madness will continue to reign. Set her pictures free. Pay artists well in their lifetime and liberate all their work when they die. It seems very obvious. See what a better place this would be.

Of course the picture is more complicated when ownership of a creative work is shared, but it would be fine if regulation proceeded from the above baseline rather than otherwise.

If you understand my pipe-dream of a perfect world, I hope it explains why I'm on the side of letting her work be freely seen, given that it deprives no-one of their entitlement, posthumously restores Maier's reputation, and brings pleasure to many.
Anyone getting rich in the process seems unimportant: if it's not locally illegal, and compensates them for work done, who cares?

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

“The living know they will die but the dead know nothing at all, nor do they have any more reward. Their love and their hate and their jealousy have already perished, and they no longer have any share in what is done under the sun. Go . . . enjoy life . . . whatever your hands find to do, do with all your might, for there is no work, nor planning, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, nor copyright royalties in the grave, where you are going.”

The law stands in very different positions on this issue around the world, but commonly it aims to legislate greed, which will never generate a fair outcome. There's no basis for extending individual copyright beyond death, beyond greed. You can inherit a chair; you can't inherit an idea. Ideas are personal and unique: only the artist deserves to benefit from them. What right does a son have to 'own' the intellectual property of their father? It's never, truly, theirs. A free ride on its coat-tails is appealing, but wrong: hypocritical and avaricious. Conversely, an infinitely rich public domain seems to me a hallmark of a grown-up civilisation that believes in education - or at least one that assigns a higher priority to the creative enrichment of humanity than the personal, financial enrichment of undeserving relatives.

Poor unconscious Vivian finds herself embroiled in a culture war about who's getting wealthy from her pictures, which only illuminates a core problem infecting the arts, science and humanities alike: that the culture values personal gain over collective advancement. Unless that changes, self-defeating conflict will dominate all human endeavour, and madness will continue to reign. Set her pictures free. Pay artists well in their lifetime and liberate all their work when they die. It seems very obvious. See what a better place this would be.

Of course the picture is more complicated when ownership of a creative work is shared, but it would be fine if regulation proceeded from the above baseline rather than otherwise.

If you understand my pipe-dream of a perfect world, I hope it explains why I'm on the side of letting her work be freely seen, given that it deprives no-one of their entitlement, posthumously restores Maier's reputation, and brings pleasure to many.
Anyone getting rich in the process seems unimportant: if it's not locally illegal, and compensates them for work done, who cares?

So if Vivien was married with children, you would deny her family the money they might need from her copyrights and throw them out into the street? All for allowing the photos to go into the public domain so the rest of us can enjoy her work without paying for it? Somehow, that doesn't sound right.

 

[Alex Benjamin]

What I am saying is that your statement right there, when heard or read by someone else, counts as a diagnosis and influences the way the reader (hearer) interprets Vivian Maier's photography. And I don't think it's a valuable observation. If it's synonymous with "collected massive amount of newspaper clippings," it's superfluous. If it's not synonymous, it is itself an interpretation which will bring a number of possibly totally irrelevant ideas into relation with Vivian Maier's work.

When an authority voices speculation, most people hear something proposed as fact. People talking on documentaries get the title of "authority" by virtue of their inclusion.

So it's Ok that you can decide how some unidentified - and unidentifiable - person will interpret my words, but I can't make a general hypothesis about some very real person on whom we have a whole lot of objective information.... What you call irrelevant, I call interesting. I absolutely disagree with you, you absolutely disagree with me. At this point, we'll just have to agree to disagree.

 

[Alex Benjamin]

Side note: I think this is a pretty good thread, going from the aesthetic to the legal to the ethic to the psychological as it does, with everybody voicing their opinions frankly and thoughtfully. Fun.

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

Side note: I think this is a pretty good thread, going from the aesthetic to the legal to the ethic to the psychological as it does, with everybody voicing their opinions frankly and thoughtfully. Fun.

Not enough about her photos - how do they affect you? influence you? their aesthetics. etc.

 

[Don_ih]

Side note: I think this is a pretty good thread, going from the aesthetic to the legal to the ethic to the psychological as it does, with everybody voicing their opinions frankly and thoughtfully. Fun.

I agree.

Not enough about her photos

Probably a different thread would be a better place for that. This thread is more about her as a phenomenon than as a photographer.

 

[16:9]

So if Vivien was married with children, you would deny her family the money they might need from her copyrights and throw them out into the street? All for allowing the photos to go into the public domain so the rest of us can enjoy her work without paying for it? Somehow, that doesn't sound right.

If Vivien committed war crimes, would you deny her children the responsibility of being punished for them? No, ownership of your life should die with you. Copyright (as the word indicates) protects the rights of the individual who created the work: it shouldn't be some arbitrary or infinite extension privileging it exclusively to an elected, talentless hanger-on long after the individual requiring protection is dead. The physical artefacts - her film and prints - should have been passed along with her possessions to a nominated family member who could have cared for them, and - why not? - profited by sharing them with a world to which those images then belong. But as this instance shows, that's not always possible: she didn't have close family she wanted to bequeath her pictures to. Whatever the motive (and I'm not sure it's fair to impute one), in this case the vultures saved her archive and the world's a slightly better place. The only thing spoiling a happy ending is bickering among the vultures.
Other opinions on this matter do exist and I wouldn't want to contest them too intensely or acrimoniously. Instinctively you will either get this idea or not.

 

[16:9]

The money is a distraction: what matters is legacy. Legacy endures. No-one cares how wealthy Plato, Blake, Newton or Shakespeare were: whatever wealth they accrued, or passed on, has long since dissipated into irrelevance. What matters is that their works and ideas are alive today, part of the conversation, and considered worthy of passing on. Vivian Maier's story resonates because her life and work so nearly vanished into obscurity. Long after this media circus has packed up and moved on - if it passes the test of time (which I think it will) - her name may sit alongside her peers and her images will become part of the future conversation, part of an educational foundation on which future photographers will build.

I can't think of a better outcome for a mortal artist, or how she could be any richer. History will forget John Maloof et al because they didn't bring anything exceptional to the table. However, I think we should be if not grateful to them, at least acknowledge the positive role they played in rescuing and publicising a collection of work that would perhaps otherwise not exist.

And that's the really scary thought: that even if you spend your life doing amazing things, you may be entirely forgotten; that you impact on nothing; that life continues as if you never were - and you may as well never have been born. That's why I think this story is important: it forces us to reflect on mortality - a profound counterpoint to the immortality photography confers on frozen moments in time.

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

If Vivien committed war crimes, would you deny her children the responsibility of being punished for them? No, ownership of your life should die with you. Copyright (as the word indicates) protects the rights of the individual who created the work: it shouldn't be some arbitrary or infinite extension privileging it exclusively to an elected, talentless hanger-on long after the individual requiring protection is dead. The physical artefacts - her film and prints - should have been passed along with her possessions to a nominated family member who could have cared for them, and - why not? - profited by sharing them with a world to which those images then belong. But as this instance shows, that's not always possible: she didn't have close family she wanted to bequeath her pictures to. Whatever the motive (and I'm not sure it's fair to impute one), in this case the vultures saved her archive and the world's a slightly better place. The only thing spoiling a happy ending is bickering among the vultures.
Other opinions on this matter do exist and I wouldn't want to contest them too intensely or acrimoniously. Instinctively you will either get this idea or not.

Children and spouses and other relatives aren't "hanger-ons". Just as a person's homeownership and other property are passed on to their heirs, so are the rights of copyrights and patents. Why would we single out artists' and inventors' property and work to not be protected similarly? It's true that Congress can and has changed the length of time the protection remains. That's open to discussion just as how much we want to tax property on death. But the basic premise of passing on property is established as a social normalcy, at least in the US.

Also, doing away with protection on death creates another issue. A lot of copyrights and patents are owned by corporations. They don;t die. So they never lose the protection afforded them. Why should a privately held copyright or patent not receive the same protection?

Note that property where there are no heirs and no will has be written disposing of the property or copyright on death to others, revert to the government the resident lived in. I believe that's the general procedure in most states.

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

The money is a distraction: what matters is legacy. Legacy endures. No-one cares how wealthy Plato, Blake, Newton or Shakespeare were: whatever wealth they accrued, or passed on, has long since dissipated into irrelevance. What matters is that their works and ideas are alive today, part of the conversation, and considered worthy of passing on. Vivian Maier's story resonates because her life and work so nearly vanished into obscurity. Long after this media circus has packed up and moved on - if it passes the test of time (which I think it will) - her name may sit alongside her peers and her images will become part of the future conversation, part of an educational foundation on which future photographers will build.

I can't think of a better outcome for a mortal artist, or how she could be any richer. History will forget John Maloof et al because they didn't bring anything exceptional to the table. However, I think we should be if not grateful to them, at least acknowledge the positive role they played in rescuing and publicising a collection of work that would perhaps otherwise not exist.

And that's the really scary thought: that even if you spend your life doing amazing things, you may be entirely forgotten; that you impact on nothing; that life continues as if you never were - and you may as well never have been born. That's why I think this story is important: it forces us to reflect on mortality - a profound counterpoint to the immortality photography confers on frozen moments in time.

‘Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.’

A good read of Ecclesiastes might help clarify this issue. The problem has been around awhile.

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

Please reserve the delusions, fairy tales and imaginary friends for the soapbox.

Trying to understand the purpose of life is what mid-life crises are all about. It's why the whole discussion of what should happen to photos after we're dead is important to so many. The discussion about Vivien Maier highlights it. She reminds us of our own mortality and limitations. We're all trying to find a purpose to why we're here and what gives life value. Sure we can have children or a large business. Leaving photos to posterity is important to many. Ecclesiastes is a philosophical tract as much as a religious and spiritual one that addresses this issue. A good read of it may help people understand these things and put their worries to rest.

 

[Sirius Glass]

The money is a distraction: what matters is legacy. Legacy endures. No-one cares how wealthy Plato, Blake, Newton or Shakespeare were: whatever wealth they accrued, or passed on, has long since dissipated into irrelevance. What matters is that their works and ideas are alive today, part of the conversation, and considered worthy of passing on. Vivian Maier's story resonates because her life and work so nearly vanished into obscurity. Long after this media circus has packed up and moved on - if it passes the test of time (which I think it will) - her name may sit alongside her peers and her images will become part of the future conversation, part of an educational foundation on which future photographers will build.

I can't think of a better outcome for a mortal artist, or how she could be any richer. History will forget John Maloof et al because they didn't bring anything exceptional to the table. However, I think we should be if not grateful to them, at least acknowledge the positive role they played in rescuing and publicising a collection of work that would perhaps otherwise not exist.

And that's the really scary thought: that even if you spend your life doing amazing things, you may be entirely forgotten; that you impact on nothing; that life continues as if you never were - and you may as well never have been born. That's why I think this story is important: it forces us to reflect on mortality - a profound counterpoint to the immortality photography confers on frozen moments in time.

Society around the world disagrees with you. You are free to state your opinion and defend it no matter how wrong or off base it may be. Pax.

 

[16:9]

Society around the world disagrees with you. You are free to state your opinion and defend it no matter how wrong or off base it may be. Pax.

If society made sense it wouldn't be necessary - from the comfort of my armchair, whilst tapping my pipe ruminatively on my knee - to rail against its failings, sir - which agreeable pursuit I shall exercise my God-given right to indulge occasionally.

 

[Pieter12]

Families of artists often suffer or sacrifice for the artist to pursue their calling. Some monetary reward in return for that is not unreasonable if the deceased artist's work has value. Not the case for Ms Maier as she had no immediate family and she was pretty much the only one who seemed to have made any sacrifice for her art.

 

[Sirius Glass]

She could have taken it all with her. Some photographers have been known to destroy their negatives.

 

[Pieter12]

I don''t think she would let go of anything.

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

Families of artists often suffer or sacrifice for the artist to pursue their calling. Some monetary reward in return for that is not unreasonable if the deceased artist's work has value. Not the case for Ms Maier as she had no immediate family and she was pretty much the only one who seemed to have made any sacrifice for her art.

I don't think we want the government to decide whether a family member should get the inheritance based on whether they were a good relative or not. Absent a will, the normal inheritance rights for all other property should apply to copyrights. If the original owner of the negatives and copyright didn't care enough to assign an inheritor, we don't need the government to stick its nose into making value judgments about people. It's bad enough we do that here.

 

[pbromaghin]

If I were an artist and knew the government was going to get my work when I die, I would invite my friends and family over and get them all drunk around a big bonfire.

 

[Sirius Glass]

I don't think we want the government to decide whether a family member should get the inheritance based on whether they were a good relative or not. Absent a will, the normal inheritance rights for all other property should apply to copyrights. If the original owner of the negatives and copyright didn't care enough to assign an inheritor, we don't need the government to stick its nose into making value judgments about people. It's bad enough we do that here.

From what I have heard from judges is that they do not like making property ownership decisions for divorces or inheritance and would rather the parties work those things out outside of court.

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

From what I have heard from judges is that they do not like making property ownership decisions for divorces or inheritance and would rather the parties work those things out outside of court.

That's true. Actually, judges would prefer that litigants makes deals outside of courts in most cases. When judges decide, they follow the law that could mean decisions are roughly hewn that would hurt more. Arrangements made between litigants are usually more "fairly" arranged as each bargain for their best outcome. Judges don't know what those are and are required to follow standard rules that will piss off both sides. You often hear how people smartly settle out of court.

 

[Pieter12]

If I were an artist and knew the government was going to get my work when I die, I would invite my friends and family over and get them all drunk around a big bonfire.

The government doesn't get your estate if you die without heirs. I am not familiar with the exact law (I'm sure it varies state by state), but your estate It might be auctioned off and they would get what money is gained from that after your debts an obligations are paid. If you have assets and die intestate and there are relatives, then it can be a big mess.

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

The government doesn't get your estate if you die without heirs. I am not familiar with the exact law (I'm sure it varies state by state), but your estate It might be auctioned off and they would get what money is gained from that after your debts an obligations are paid. If you have assets and die intestate and there are relatives, then it can be a big mess.

Forty years ago when my grandmother died, my aunt cleared out all her jewelry the next day. I didn't think that was fair. So I called my attorney and asked what happens in the situation where there is no will yet there's jewelry in the deceased house. He said whoever gets there first, gets the jewelry.

 

[pbromaghin]

The government doesn't get your estate if you die without heirs. I am not familiar with the exact law (I'm sure it varies state by state), but your estate It might be auctioned off and they would get what money is gained from that after your debts an obligations are paid. If you have assets and die intestate and there are relatives, then it can be a big mess.

I didn't say they would. Only what I would do.

In Vivian Maier discussions, more than one person has said her photos should have gone to some government agency that would be responsible for presenting them to the public. Stupidest goddamned idea on earth.

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

I didn't say they would. Only what I would do.

In Vivian Maier discussions, more than one person has said her photos should have gone to some government agency that would be responsible for presenting them to the public. Stupidest goddamned idea on earth.

Well, if they sent them to me, I'd take care they would be distributed properly.