Video from the scene of the arrests helped clear the photographers in both cases.

In New York, police accused New York University photography student Alexander Arbuckle of blocking traffic at an Occupy protest march on January 1. He maintained that he was photographing from the sidewalk at the time of his arrest. At trial, the judge dismissed the charges after Arbuckle’s defense attorneys showed a video by another journalist showing police massing near people on the sidewalk, and then arresting them, according to AP.

In the Seattle incident, photographer Joshua Garland was accused of grabbing and twisting the arm of a police officer at a May Day protest in downtown Seattle. The Seattle Times reports that prosecutors decided they couldn’t prove the charges against Garland after his defense attorney showed a video of the incident. According to that same report, the attorney pieced the video together from “video segments posted on YouTube by witnesses and other footage shot by a local television station.”

Muholi has documented the lives of black lesbians in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Malawi and Uganda, and has received awards and recognition in South Africa and abroad.

According to reports, hard drives and computers containing her archive of still photographs and video footage, representing more than five years’ worth of work, were the only things stolen from the apartment, fueling speculation that the theft was a targeted attempt to silence an artist who has been as controversial as she has been celebrated. Among the contents of the stolen hard drives were photographs of the funerals of lesbians killed in hate crimes.

The theft occurred on April 20 and the investigation is said to be ongoing.

Muholi did back up her work, but the back-up hard drives were kept in the same apartment and were also stolen, she told the Cape Times. The theft is a tragic reminder of the benefit of storing archives and backups in more than one location.

The business prospectus is incomplete, so Shutterstock has not yet specified the number of shares it intends to sell or the price. But for the purposes of its filing the company estimated it would raise no more than $115 million.

Founded eight years ago by CEO (and majority shareholder) Jonathan Oringer, Shutterstock was one of the first microstock agencies to offer subscription-based pricing. That allows users to download up to 25 images per day for a flat fee of $250 per month, or $2559 per year. Users can also license image on demand, for prices starting at about $10 per image.

Last year, Shutterstock’s total sales revenues were $120 million, a 45 percent increase over 2010 revenues of $83 million and nearly double the 2009 revenues of $61 million. The average price users paid per image download last year was $2.05, according to Shutterstock’s SEC filing.

Meanwhile, net income–which is income after administrative, marketing, and research and development costs are subtracted from total revenues–has hovered around $20 million for the past three years. Income has remained relatively flat despite the rise in revenues because Shutterstock’s operating costs have increased by about 50 percent per year since 2009. Operating costs were $97 million last year.

The company says it plans to use the IPO money for operations. Shutterstock says it plans to invest in new technology, and in its sales and marketing efforts to attract more contributors and customers. Most customers are small and medium-sized businesses, but Shutterstock says it hasn’t fully tapped that market. It also wants to increase revenues from large businesses, which currently account for just 10 percent of its revenues.

Shutterstock claims an image database of more than 19 million photos and illustrations and 500,000 video clips, provided by more than 35,000 contributors. The vast majority of contributors are amateur photographers.

Lowy says he contacted Hipstamatic about creating an option in the app that better adheres to newspaper standards for photojournalists when he returned from Libya. He describes the Ben Lowy Lens as being “pure and fairly straightforward” and “slightly desaturated, clarity is up, it’s contrasty.”

Now that there’s soon to be a Ben Lowy Lens, we started to think about what Hipstamatic lenses named for other photographers might look like. If you had your own Hipstamatic lens, what would it do?

“It has a sensor designed exclusively for black and white photography. It has no color filter,” said Dr. Andreas Kauffman, Leica’s Chairman at a special product unveiling event in Berlin today.

“This allows twice the amount of light to reach the sensor. So we combined this special sensor with our rangefinder system and we present you the M Monochrome with the maximized image quality available with Leica lenses.”

Kauffman later added that the new Leica M Monochrome “doesn’t mean the death of black-and-white film.”

Read more and see exclusive photos of the Leica M Monochrome digital rangefinder here.

PDN is currently in Berlin covering the launch and we’ll have more on Leica’s other announcements soon.

Credit The Art Newspaper, a British publication, with taking on that argument. Yesterday they reported that Warhol, Rauschenberg and other big name appropriation artists quit stealing the work of others–and started getting licenses instead–after they got sued once or twice (or five times) for infringement.

“There is growing evidence—albeit rarely reported—that, although these artists may have started out as willing or unwitting outlaws, they decided that possibly infringing other artists’ copyright was legally unwise and potentially expensive, and they stopped,” writes Laura Gilbert for The Art Newspaper.

She reports that Andy Warhol faced lawsuits in the 1960s for unauthorized use of photographs by Patricia Caulfield, Fred Ward, and Charles Moore. He settled the claims out of court, and afterwards started asking for permission before incorporating works by others into his own creations. “He learned a lesson from the lawsuits,” Warhol’s gallerist, Ronald Feldman, told Gilbert.

Robert Rauschenberg was sued in the 1970s for unauthorized use of one of Morton Beebe’s photographs. After settling the suit in 1980, Rauschenberg reportedly quit appropriating the work of other artists. Jeff Koons, another appropriation artist who was famously sued (and lost) over the “String of Puppies” sculpture he copied without permission from a photograph, no longer uses the work of others without permission, his lawyer told The Art Newspaper.

Gilbert cites other examples, too. The message is that former art pirates with big names weren’t above the law, after all, and when they were sued into compliance, it wasn’t the end of appropriation art, much less civilization.

Richard Prince has already been held liable for infringement by a federal trial court judge. His appeal is pending. A victory for Prince, it seems, would put him in a special class of pirates with immunity, pretty much by himself.

Related:
Appropriation Artist Richard Prince Liable for Infringement, Court Rules
In Cariou v. Prince, an Appeal to Clarify a Crucial Fair Use Boundary

"Dead Troops Talk (A vision after an ambush of a Red Army patrol, near Moqor, Afghanistan, winter 1986," © Jeff Wall.

A 1992 photograph by Jeff Wall sold for $3,666,500 yesterday evening during a Post-War and Contemporary art auction at Christie’s in New York City. The previous record sale for a work by Jeff Wall was $1.1 million.

The work “Dead Troops Talk (A vision after an ambush of a Red Army patrol, near Moqor, Afghanistan, winter 1986″ depicts a grisly scene in which Soviet Red Army soldiers killed by the Afghan mujahideen have come back to life and are conversing with one another.

The photograph, framed in a light box, was the first in an edition of two, with one artist’s print. The photograph has been in the collection of David and Geraldine Pincus, who acquired it from Marian Goodman Gallery in New York. The Pincus’s substantial collection formed a major part of the sale, which set a record for a Post-War and Contemporary art sale at $388.5 million, according to Christie’s.

The high lot in the sale was Mark Rothko’s “Orange, Red, Yellow,” which sold for $86.9 million, another record for a work from the Post-War period.

Three other photographs were included in the sale. A Richard Prince work that appropriated a Marlboro advertisement, “Untitled (Cowboys),” sold for $602,500. Cindy Sherman’s “Untitled #122″ sold for $206,500. And Nan Goldin’s “Ballad Triptych” sold for $218,500.

Related: Eggleston’s First-Ever Large Pigment Prints Earn 5.9 Million at Auction

McCrary was born and raised in Los Angeles. He was a self-taught photographer who eventually studied at Pasadena City College and Art Center College of Design. McCrary began his career as a staff photographer at various portrait studios and in the photography department of Rockwell International, a manufacturing company involved in the aircraft, space and consumer electronics industries, amongst others.

In 1967 he became the chief photographer for A&M Records and ended up photographing over 300 album covers during the seven years he worked there. Some of his most famous covers include Carole King’s Tapestry, the Carpenters’ Ticket to Ride and Joe Crocker’s Mad Dogs and Englishmen. He also shot related publicity and advertising work for Gram Parsons, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Cat Stevens, Peter Frampton, Herb Alpert and other musicians.

After leaving the label, he owned his own studio in Hollywood until 1990. He then co-founded Pix Inc., a professional camera store in Los Angeles.

McCrary is survived by his son, Jason McCrary, and his brothers Wylee Dale McCrary and Doug McCrary.

The new details, which are part of a motion Morel filed last month asking the judge to hold Getty and AFP liable for infringement, were sent by Morel’s lawyer to PDN and several others. They are neatly summarized by Jeremy Nicholl on The Russian Photos Blog.

Nicholl leads off by quoting an internal e-mail from AFP deputy photo editor for North America Eva Hambach:  “AFP got caught with its hand in the cookie jar, and will have to pay.” Ten days after Hambach wrote that to a colleague in March, 2010, AFP slapped Morel with a lawsuit to gag him and punish him for publicly accusing AFP of violating his copyrights.

To re-cap, Morel–a native of Haiti and a former AP photographer–was in Haiti at the time of the January, 2010 earthquake. He posted exclusive images of the destruction on his Twitpic account less than two hours later. The images were immediately stolen and re-posted under the name of another Twitter user. AFP picked up the images and distributed them under the false credit through its own image service and through Getty. They did that even though editors at both companies knew that the images were Morel’s, and that they did not have his permission to distribute them.

Morel objected. His agent, Corbis, sent take-down notices to Getty and AFP, but it took AFP two days to issue a kill notice. And when they did, they told clients and partners to kill images credited to Morel, but not the identical images that had been sent out initially under the false credit. Getty allegedly didn’t purge the images with the false credits, and continued to distribute them.

With Morel continuing to insist that his copyrights had been violated, AFP sued, and Morel fought back. Getty and AFP have done their best to wear Morel down by dragging out the process, but the photographer has refused to give up. He has already won an important decision against AFP, which argued that anything posted on Twitpic is free for the taking, according to the Twitpic terms of service. The court summarily rejected that defense.

Meanwhile, Getty continues to try to hide behind the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. The company says, in effect, that it was merely a passive provider of server space to AFP so it shouldn’t be held liable as an infringer. On the grounds that Getty is AFP’s partner and an active marketer and distributor of AFP images, Morel is asking the court to reject Getty’s DMCA defense.

What it boils down to is a case of two companies bullying a photographer they got caught stealing from. AFP and Getty aren’t the first to move images without permission in a cutthroat business that has a history of steal-now-and-apologize-later tactics. What’s unusual is the unwillingness of the two companies to own up to their ethical lapse and legal breach by apologizing and quietly paying to settle it.

We contacted Hambach to ask her about the internal repercussions of her “cookie jar” e-mail. Was she taken to the woodshed for it? Is there any sign that AFP is taking stock of its policies with regard to recouping images? “I can’t talk about this now,” she said, ending the conversation at the mention of her e-mail.

A hearing on Morel’s motion for summary judgment is scheduled for July. The judge is unlikely to issue a decision before fall.

Pastry chef Johnny Iuzzini. © Jeff Scott

Fine-art photographer Jeff Scott won the 2012 James Beard Foundation Award in the Photography category for Notes From a Kitchen: A Journey Inside Culinary Obsession. The award for the self-published, two-volume book, which is a collaboration between Scott and chef Blake Beshore, was announced on Friday, May 4, 2012, in New York City.

The book doesn’t contain any recipes, but instead aims to reveal the creative process for some of the top, young chefs in America. Shot documentary-style, Scott’s photos show the chefs at work and away from the kitchen as well as their personal notebooks where menus are planned and recipes created.

Some of the notebooks included in the book. © Jeff Scott

Other finalists for the prize were food, still-life and lifestyle photographer Joseph De Leo, who was nominated for The Cheesemonger’s Kitchen, and food and travel photographer Alan Benson, who worked on Rustica: A Return to Spanish Home Cooking. Last year, Danish photographer Ditte Isager won the photography award for her work on the cookbook Noma: Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine.

The James Beard Foundation is a non-profit organization that offers “events and programs designed to educate, inspire, entertain and foster a deeper understanding of our culinary culture.” Each year the foundation recognizes people in every aspect of the food and beverage industry—from chefs and restaurateurs to cookbook authors and food writers—who have excelled in their fields. Editorial and commercial photographer Landon Nordeman received the 2012 James Beard Foundation Award in the new category of Visual Storytelling for his Saveur assignments “The Soul of Sicily,” “BBQ Nation” and “Heart of the Valley.” Also of note: Gastronomica was awarded Publication of the Year alongside the Web site Food52.

Notes From a Kitchen: A Journey Inside Culinary Obsession. © Jeff Scott

To see the complete list of 2012 James Beard Foundation Book, Broadcast and Journalism Award winners, go to jamesbeard.org.

Related Article:

Cookbooks Come Out of the Kitchen