Is Bob Dylan–that champion of the poor, the tired, the oppressed–a brazen rip-off artist and infringer of photographers’ copyrights? And if so, who’s going to stop him?

©Rob McKeever/Gagosian Gallery--Bob Dylan's facsimile of the 1948 Cartier-Bresson photo shown below.

©Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos--a 1948 photograph of a eunuch who once served in China's Imperial Court.

Reports (here and here) about the exhibit of Dylan’s new paintings called “The Asia Series” at the Gagosian Gallery in New York certainly suggest a theft problem here. Several of the paintings appear to be unattributed facsimiles of photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Bruce Gilden, Dmitri Kessel, Leon Busy, and others.

The Gagosian Gallery originally described the show as a a “visual journal” of Dylan’s travels in Asia. But after visitors began to recognize Dylan’s paintings for what they are, Gagosian took to calling “The Asia Series” a “visual reflection” of the legendary songwriter’s travels in Asia.

The Huffington Post quips, “No less than ten [of the paintings] may in fact be a visual reflections of Dylan’s travels through online photo archives rather than of any personal journey.”

Gagosian has issued a statement acknowledging that Dylan’s compositions are “based on a variety of sources, including archival, historic images.” But the gallery adds that “the paintings’ vibrancy and freshness come from the colors and textures found in everyday scenes he observed during his travels.”

In other words, Dylan has in some way transformed the images to make them his own–a point that could be subject to vigorous and costly debate in a federal court if Dylan gets sued.

That’s a big if. Right now, the question is: Who (if anyone) has the temerity and resources to take Dylan to court for copyright infringement?

Another pressing question is, Why is the Gagosian Gallery continuing to aid and abet copyright infringers? Earlier this year, a federal court found that Gagosian and Richard Prince infringed photographer Patrick Cariou’s copyrights by exhibiting a series of Prince paintings that were copied from Cariou’s photographs. Did Gagosian learn anything at all from its ignominious legal defeat in that case? (Prince, by the way, is appealing the verdict.)

Finally, a bonus question: If you or I–rather than Bob Dylan–had painted “The Asia Series,” would Gagosian have even let us in the door with this pile of photo faxes, much less mounted an exhibition?

All together now: The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind. The answer is blowin’ in the wind.

Related story:
Appropriation Artist Richard Prince Liable for Infringement, Court Rules

Three months after VII Pboto announced a shakeup to its structure, the changes at the photographers’ cooperative have finally played out with the announcement today of its new members. They are Davide Monteleone, Anastasia Taylor-Lind, Lynsey Addario, Jocelyn Bain Hogg, Stefano de Luigi, Venetia Dearden, Jessica Dimmock, Adam Ferguson, Ashley Gilbertson, Seamus Murphy, Maciek Nabrdalik, Tomas Van Houtryve and Donald Weber.

Monteleone is brand new to the agency; Anastasia Taylor-Lind had been a photographer with the VII Mentor Program. The other new members had all been part of the VII Network, which had operated as a kind of farm league within the agency,  offering fewer services than members of VII Photo received.

VII announced in June that the VII Network would be dissolved in October, 2011, and invited VII Network members to apply for full membership. The members met last week to select from portfolios submitted.

When the restructuring was announced in June, VII member Ron Haviv said, “This year marks the tenth anniversary of VII’s formation and it is a perfect time to fully embrace a new generation of curious and enterprising VII photographers who will help us steer the agency into the future.”

VII’s other veteran members include Marcus Bleasdale, Ed Kashi, Gary Knight, Antonin Kratochvil, Joachim Ladefoged, Christopher Morris, Franco Pagetti, Stephanie Sinclair and John Stanmeyer. (James Nachtwey quit the agency earlier this year.)

VII Network photographers who did not apply for full membership or who applied but were not admitted include  Andrea Bruce, Eric Bouvet, Benedicte Kurzen, Tivadar Domaniczky and Ziyah Gafic.

The restructuring is intended to put VII on a better financial footing by bringing in active, young members, and will also change photographers’ contract terms. According to a statement from VII, “The simplified structure allows all members equal access to the agency’s services and offers clients full-service support for the photographers on VII’s roster.”

Related Stories

VII Dissolves Network, Announces New Mentors

Nachtwey Has Left VII Photo; Agency Prepares for Expansion

Photographer collective LUCEO Images announced the opening of an online store that the group of documentary photographers hopes will allow them to “assert more creative control over the production and distribution of our work,” they said.

The group will sell limited- and open-edition prints, books and other creative work through their online store. The store’s proceeds will go into a general fund supporting new projects by the photographers, as well as other initiatives like their grant for student photographers and their donations in support of other photographers through crowd-funding sites like KickStarter and Emphas.is.

LUCEO is launching the store with the sale of the second issue of their magazine, 2×2. The magazine features the work of members Kendrick Brinson and Matt Eich, and it is also being sold in a limited edition featuring two prints.

The collective plans to offer a new print for sale on the site every two weeks.

More at store.luceoimages.com.

© Mario Tama/Getty Images

Note to photographers covering the United Nations General Assembly: It pays to carry a telephoto lens.

Yesterday, Michael Shaw at Bag News noted that Getty Images photographer Mario Tama had managed to zoom in on the text of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to the General Assembly on September 23, capturing the prime minister’s handwritten notes, cross outs and revisions.

Six years ago at another UN gathering, President George W. Bush slipped a note to Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice saying he would need a bathroom break. The text of that note was captured by a sharp-eyed Reuters photographer who, like Tama, was shooting from a booth above the hall.

Though slightly less amusing than a request by a world leader to go to the boys’ room, Netanyahu’s revised speech came 40 minutes after Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas had called on the UN to establish a Palestinian state.  Comparing Netanyahu’s typed text with the speech as he delivered it, Shaw speculates that Netanyahu had scribbled down changes in reaction to Abbas’s statements.

Tama tells PDN that he had been covering the UN assembly for three days from locations among the roughly two dozen booths above the assembly. “Some are filled with photographers, others with video people, others with translators,” Tama explains. “As photographers we have a bit of leeway to explore angles from a few different booths, as long as we stay out of the way of the official UN camera crews and the like.”

As Netanyahu’s speech went on, “I began to notice some heavy blue-ink scribblings on the side of his notes,” says Tama, who has covered the UN many times in the past ten years.  “I don’t recall ever seeing such prominent markings and corrections on a world leader’s speech before.”

He notes, “After shooting all the angles of him delivering the speech, I decided to try and just focus on the notes for the latter part of the speech.” He shot several photos of the notes with a  400mm lens, but couldn’t make out the words through his viewfinder. “I could only properly make them out once I blew them up in Photoshop.” The images, he says, “obviously had to be cropped quite significantly, hence the less than perfect image quality. I felt in this instance the unique content overrode quality concerns.”

Tama adds that if he had seen similar notes on Abbas’s text, he would have photographed those as well; he only recalls seeing that Abbas’s speech was in Arabic.

More of Tama’s close-up images are shown in “Over Netanyahu’s Shoulder” on Bagnewsnotes.com. Tama says to his knowledge “Bag News is the first significant publication of the images.” 

Well, this is certainly an interesting take on the “first person shooter” type war video game. An Australia-based company called Defiant Development has created a video game called Warco: The News Game where the goal is to capture images and videos of scenes of war and then edit them into a story.

Another unique angle is that the game’s main Warco, i.e. “war correspondent” character, Jesse DeMarco, is a woman. (Pretty unusual for a war-based video game.)

Here’s how the game is described on Defiant’s site.

WARCO lets players shoot and record what they see ‘through the lens’ – framing shots, panning and zooming, grabbing powerful images of combatants and civilians caught up in war. They’ve got AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades – you’ve got a flak jacket, a video camera, and a burning desire to get the story. Every game space is embedded with multiple objectives and story leads for journalist Jesse DeMarco to find – a scoop if she’s smart, mortal danger if she drops her guard. Record dramatic images of war, save them in-game, then edit the results into a compelling frontline TV news story. Beam the results to global audiences on the web.

From the screen shots and trailer for Warco (see below) it seems the correspondent is a video journalist, not a still photographer.

We’re wondering though what PDN readers think of the concept of making a photojournalist the focus of a war-based video game. Good idea? Bad idea? Can’t wait to get your hands on the game?

(via Laughing Squid)

© Danny Goldfield. Photo: Ben, Burundi.

After months of controversy, the Park51 Islamic Cultural Center  opened in lower Manhattan on September 21 with a photo exhibition that celebrates New York’s diversity. “NYChildren” is an ongoing project by photographer Danny Goldfield, who is photographing a New York City child born in every country in the world.  The hundreds of visitors and international journalists who crowded into the refurbished storefront for the opening last night got to see the 169 photos Goldfield has taken in New York City since he began the project in 2004. It’s a feel-good debut exhibition for Park51, dubbed “the Ground Zero mosque” by protesters who opposed the opening of an Islamic cultural and prayer center within a five-minute walk of the September 11 Memorial site.

The day after the opening, Goldfield was still amazed by the crowd at the event. “I don’t know how many journalists I talked to last night,” he told PDN. He noted that some in last night’s crowd may have been wary visiting the space. “My hope is that they’ll step through the threshold and be in this pristine white gallery with 169 photos and feel more comfortable.”

Goldfield, who describes himself as “a proud Jew,” says his NYChildren project was inspired by the idea that bonding with our neighbors can strengthen communities.

(more…)

©Robert Whitaker--the original "Yesterday And Today" cover

Photographer Robert Whitaker, best known for the hundreds of behind-the-scenes images and album cover shots he made of The Beatles from 1964 to 1966 when the band was rising to international fame, died September 20 in the UK. The cause of death was cancer, according to a UK Press Association report.

Whitaker was part of the Australian art scene in the early 1960s when he accompanied a journalist friend to interview Brian Epstein, the manager of The Beatles. At the time, the band was touring Australia and Asia. Epstein was impressed by Whitaker’s work, and invited him to accompany the band as a tour photographer.

Whitaker accepted, moved back to London where he had begun his career in the late 1950s (he was born in the UK in 1939), and went to work photographing various bands for Epstein’s management company, NEMS Enterprises.

Whitaker accompanied The Beatles on their second tour of the US in 1965, photographing them at their famous Shea Stadium concert, among other venues.  From 1964 to 1966, he had almost complete access to the band while it was on tour and in the studio.

©Robert Whitaker--the hasty replacement image for the same album.

He is credited with several Beatles album covers, including the original–and highly controversial–”butcher” cover for the album Yesterday And Today. It showed the four Beatles dressed in lab coats and wearing false teeth while holding dismembered dolls and pieces of raw meat. The cover was quickly withdrawn amid public outrage and some speculation that it was intended as acerbic social commentary.

Capitol Records, the band’s record company, told the Associate Press that it was the band’s idea of “pop art satire.” John Lennon told an interviewer in 1980 that the band posed for the picture out of boredom at having to pose for yet another picture.

The image was replaced on the album cover with a photograph that Whitaker shot hastily in Epstein’s office of the band gathered around a trunk. Whitaker later described the replacement image as “far more stupid than anything else I could think of,” according to various accounts of the image. Copies of the album with the original “butcher” photo now fetch thousands of dollars on the Beatles memorabilia market.

Whitaker left NEMS when The Beatles took a break from touring in 1966. He stayed in London to photograph other musicians, including Eric Clapton and Mick Jagger, and also covered news events–Including the Vietnam War–for Time and Life magazines.

Whitaker’s books include Eight Days A Week: Inside the Beatles Final World Tour (2008), Unseen Beatles (1998) and In the Company of Dali (2007), which is a collection of images he shot of the Spanish surrealist in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Nikon unveiled a new compact system camera (CSC) tonight called the Nikon 1. The system, which consists of two compact camera bodies — the J1 ($649) and the V1 ($899), which both use new 10-megapixel sensors in a new Nikon-designed CX-format (13.2x 8.8mm) — is aimed at consumers and prosumers and includes four lenses: a 10mm f/2.8, 10-30mm f/3.5-5.6, and 30-110mm f/3.8-f/5., and 10-100mm f/4.5-5.5 “power zoom” lens.

The new Nikon cameras, which were the subject of intense Internet speculation and rumors in the last few months, were unveiled at a highly secretive event in New York City tonight with select members of the press. Journalists, including this reporter, were forced to surrender their laptops prior to the 12:01am unveiling of the Nikon 1 system at the Bath Houses event space in the Chelsea section of Manhattan.

Read our full story and see more photos here.

The winner and finalists for the 2011 W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography will be announced on Wednesday, October 19th at a ceremony in New York City.

The event, which is open to the public, will take place at the Asia Society, 725 Park Ave (at 70th Street). Admission is free, and on a first come, first served basis.  The doors will open at 6 p.m. The ceremony will begin at 6:30 after a reception.

The Smith Grant is presented annually to a photographer whose past work and proposed project follows the tradition of W. Eugene Smith, the renowned photojournalist who died in 1978. Recent winners include Darcy Padilla, Lu Guang, and Mikhael Subotzky.

For 2011, the amount of the grant will be $30,000. An additional $5,000 in fellowship money will be awarded, at the discretion of the jury, to one or more finalists deemed worthy of special recognition.

Update: The keynote address at the W. Eugene Smith Grant presentation will be given by journalist and author Sebastian Junger, co-director with Tim Hetherington of the documentary Restrepo and author of War. On the 10th anniversary of the war in Afghanistan, there will be a presentation of work by 2007 Smith grant recipient Stephen Dupont’s Generation AK: The Afghanistan Wars and The Perils of Freedom.

More information is available at www.smithfund.org.

Here’s a nice video feature from CBS News about how Dallas-based pet photographer Teresa Berg is helping shelter dogs get adopted by taking professional photos of them.

(Thanks Mason.)
There’s a short ad before the video starts.