personalities

legendary Shehnai maestro late Ustad Bismillah Khan.
(The shehnai is an aerophonic instrument which is thought to bring good luck, and as a result, is widely used in North India for marriages and processions.This tube-like instrument gradually widens towards the lower end. It usually has between six and nine holes. It employs two sets of double reeds, making it a quadruple reed woodwind. By controlling the breath, various tunes can be played on it)

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Stock Tips: News From Photo Agencies

By Daryl Lang (PDN)

The latest on the stock photo business:

Getty's Future: Consumers, Music, And (Surprise) Acquisitions

In the next four months Getty Images plans to launch new a new consumer business and a music licensing service.

Some rare hints about upcoming products came during a presentation last Wednesday by Getty CEO Jonathan Klein at an Internet conference organized by Goldman Sachs.

"We plan to launch a consumer business in the next 90 to 120 days," Klein said, without revealing what the business is. He mentioned this in connection with Getty's new strategy of operating multiple Web sites for different customers – including gettyimages.com, iStockphoto.com and new acquisition PunchStock.

Klein also expressed hope that the text-only search ads sold through Google will eventually incorporate multimedia content, like photos and video, both of which Getty provides. On that note, he added, "We will be providing music to our customers within 90 days."

Klein declined to predict how big the music business could become. Getty competitor Jupitermedia runs a stock music service at RoyaltyFreeMusic.com, which is a relatively small part of Jupiterimages.

Klein was asked about the failed talks to acquire Jupitermedia and declined to say anything new. Later, Klein took a shot at archrival Corbis, saying, "I respect Corbis," but "It is worth pointing out that iStockPhoto made more profit yesterday than Corbis did in its entire history, and I think that matters in business."

Asked about Getty's financial priorities, Klein said, "The past is a really great guide for the future for us, and that's acquisitions, acquisitions, acquisitions. We're very good at doing acquisitions. I think we've done about 90. One of them was a complete disaster, and that was in 1999, the rest have worked out extremely well."

The 1999 failure he was referring to was Art.com – a consumer service that Getty gave up on in 2001.

Klein's presentation is available here.


More Getty News

- Getty Images has re-upped its deal with the National Hockey League and will remain the league's exclusive commercial imagery licensor for the next four years. Getty and the NHL have been in partnership since 2002.

- Newscom is now distributing 500,000 royalty-free photos from Getty Images. Collections represented include Digital Vision, Photodisc, Photographer's Choice, Retrofile, Stockbyte and National Geographic (a Getty partner).

- Pixsy, a company that provides search services for image collections, has teamed up with Getty-owned iStockphoto. All of iStock's images will be searchable through the Pixsy.com portal. Separately, Pixsy will power three new portals for specific kinds of stock photography for SuperStock, which is owned by a21.


Launches and deals

- Drive Images is a new right-managed stock library of 25,000 automotive images. The wholly owned collection was developed by eVox Productions, which also licenses images through third-party sites via its Automotive Image Library.

- London-based Photolibrary Group has launched a new collection called Fresh Food Images (FFI). FFI incorporates 200,000 images from 100 photographers, including the Anthony Blake Food Library.

- AP Images, the photo licensing arm of the Associated Press, is distributing content from the archives of EBONY and JET magazines, which are part of the Johnson Publishing Company.

- Software developer CogniSign recently launched a beta version of xcavator.net, a visual search engine. For now, the site is searching 300,000 images from Photovault.com, but the company expects to add more collections in the coming months.

- Alamy is distributing GoGo Images, a multicultural, royalty-free lifestyle collection.

- Imaginechina is now distributing the features and archive of Agence VU in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Imageinechina already represents photo agencies Magnum and Anzenberger for Chinese markets.

- Digital Railroad has expanded its service for photographers by adding business tools powered by ADBASE Inc. and HindSight Ltd.

Send suggestions for stock photo news to news editor Daryl Lang (dlang@pdnonline.com).

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a pakistani band "junoon", performs at a festival

egyptian dancer

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Oded Balilty Credits Teamwork For Pulitzer-Winning Photo

May 23, 2007 © AP Photo/Oded Balilty
By Daryl Lang (PDN)

A day after accepting the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News photography, Oded Balilty credited two fellow Associated Press photographers with helping him get his winning photograph.

Balilty was working as a team of three – along with staffer Emilio Morenatti and stringer Baz Ratner – to cover a confrontation between settlers and Israeli soldiers on a hillside in the West Bank in February 2006. With Morenatti covering one side of the scene, Balilty said he was free to move to the other side for a different angle. Then, once they had the pictures, Ratner rushed to Jerusalem on his motorcycle to transmit them.

"It's a great example of teamwork," Balilty said. "Sometimes to take the picture is the least thing you can do."

Balilty spoke as part of a panel discussion on conflict photojournalism at the AP office in New York. He was joined by photojournalists Horst Faas, Hal Buell, Anja Niedringhaus and Santiago Lyon.

Lyon, the director of photography for the AP, said photo editors considered cleaning up the dark specks in the upper right corner of Balilty's photo, believing they were caused by a dirty lens or camera sensor. But then they realized the specks were rocks flying through the air.

Lyon asked the panel about the importance of local staff in conflict areas. He mentioned Balilty, who is based in his home city of Jerusalem, and Bilal Hussein, the AP photographer who has been imprisoned in Iraq for more than a year.

"In Baghdad, we tried from very early on to get local photographers," said Niedringhaus, who was part of the team that won a 2005 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of Iraq. After seeing the staffers work for a while, "You know who's really good, and Bilal was one of them."

Niedringhaus and Faas, who was the AP's chief photographer covering the Vietnam War, discussed the differences between photo coverage then and now.

Niedringhaus said as part of the ground rules for embedding, photojournalists are supposed to secure advance permission from the troops to take their photos if they are injured. It makes it difficult to make a friendly connection, she said.

"How do you want to make friends when you're asking, 'In case something happens in the next 10 minutes, can I take your picture?'" she said. New rules that let police keep journalists away from bombing scenes have also made photography more difficult in Iraq, she said.

By contrast, Faas said journalists were welcomed by the troops in Vietnam. One reason for this was that soldiers had less access to news – no Internet or TV, and little radio.

"They were so grateful if a reporter hung around and talked to them and explained the situation," Faas said. "We were welcomed for what we were, messengers. The Army didn't provide any of that."

The photographers also talked about how they cope with seeing terrible things in war.

Faas said he and other journalists enjoyed collecting pottery in Vietnam. "That was a wonderful relief from the ugly work you're doing," he said. He also said it helps when you're convinced your work serves a purpose.

Balilty says he paints and works on features to take a break from conflict photography.

"I think I'm too young to realize what I'm seeing, what I'm in to," said Balilty, who is in his 20s. "After seeing a bus blow up, when you see people on fire, how can you forget it? And you have nightmares sometimes."

But having been off for three weeks, he said he was feeling "itchy" to get back to work. "I don't know how to deal with that, I just do what I'm doing."

Airshow

Jumeirah beach goers watch airshow display in Dubai

Skh Zayed

Workers work on a poster of Skh Zayed in Dubai.2007

Copyright

(C) Copyright for these photos belongs solely to S. KIRAN PRASAD/Organisation. Images may not be copied, downloaded, or used in any way without the expressed, written permission of the photographer.

Aerial

These pictures were taken from a helicopter for a book published by GN in Dubai.

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Aerial

One man and his Leica: An audience with enigmatic Magnum photographer Elliott Erwitt.

One man and his Leica: An audience with enigmatic Magnum photographer Elliott Erwitt.
Elliott Erwitt is on PR duty at the Frankfurt Book Fair. He stands, somewhat awkwardly, as a phalanx of German photographers with large lenses take his picture. They probably think they're taking a decent portrait. But they don't see that under the sober tweed jacket, there is a pair of Stars and Stripes braces. Nor will they guess that Elliott Erwitt, veteran of worldfamous Magnum photo agency, almost certainly finds their whirring and flashing ridiculous. He looks over to where I am skulking by the book-piles, and grins.

Erwitt has a reputation for quietness. A journalist once wanted to write 12,000 words on the man, and a fellow photographer said, "In all the years I've spoken to him, Elliott hasn't spoken 12,000 words." Actually, he speaks easily. He smiles and twinkles. He is one of the few people who can treat an interview as a conversation. Which is how I know about the braces – "my small patriotic gesture". And how I know, though his gentlemanly courtesy prevents him from speaking ill of most things, that he has an antipathy to paraphernalia. "Photography is very simple," he says. "People make it so technical, so complicated, to disguise the fact. They overcompensate."

This would surprise the Nikon-carriers: Erwitt's forty-year career has included plenty of commercial work – for the French tourist board, for Italian fashion houses, for airlines and big business – where he has happily used the assistant, the filters, the whole ostentatious, complicated baggage of the modern photographer.

But it is another Elliot whose work he is promoting here in the 500-picture collection Snaps. The anti-Elliott – his work was once called "anti-photos" – shoots only in black and white, usually takes one shot only, is never without a Leica in his pocket, and will wait hours for one snap. This Erwitt says, "I observe, I try to entertain, but above all, I want pictures that are emotional." This Erwitt finds people who ask what film he uses hilarious – he uses what's in his bag ?– and people who ask how hard it is to use colour ("you just put a colour film in the camera") funnier still. And for apparently simple snaps that can contain fathoms of emotional input, the anti-Elliott is peerless.

Yet his name is probably unknown to most. If anything, he's a taker of funny pictures with easy charm, or a photographic dog-lover: His Dog Dogs book has sold 250,000 copies. A professional photographer will know him as a master of inimitably perfect composition and deceptive casualness. To the true fan, he has an eye for a shot like no other, and his work has the pathos and insight of Cartier-Bresson and the charm of Doisneau, though he has the name-droppability of neither. Hence Snaps. "Books aren't very rumunerative," he muses over bad German food. "But you get jobs out of it and that leads to work." His face – soulful and doleful, like Matthau without the jowls – creases into irony. "Besides, I have to do it – I've been around so long, most editors think I'm dead."

He was born in Paris in 1928, to a Russian Jew called Boris, and a Russian Greek Orthodox mother called Evgenia. It was textbook romantic: Evgenia had been one of the richest girls in Moscow, but lost everything in the Revolution. Boris was a dilettante from Odessa. Almost immediately, they moved to Italy, and Elio Romano Erwitz – his middle name a homage to the Holy City – grew up speaking Italian in public, Russian at home. But Mussolini forced the family out, and in 1939 they took the last peacetime ship from France, landing in New York to a world five days into war. Later, Boris took his child to the West Coast, and the marriage broke down. By then Elio Erwitz had become Elliott Erwitt, easier for American mouths to pronounce, and he had begun to live in a fourth language.

The instability chased him into adulthood: Four wives – "none beheaded" – six children, five grandchildren. He met his current wife, German zweedheart Pia, when she came to interview him. He doesn't say much about the others, except that they were beautiful and smart, and that his love of America's southern states dimmed after his marriage – number three – to a Southerner. When I say his private life could be called chaotic, he replies, "Well, what do you mean? Changing countries I suppose was chaotic. Changing cities. Living on your own at an early age. I've married a few times." He pauses. "Is that chaos? Perhaps it's just activity."

He began being properly active aged 16, after his father left for New Orleans, fleeing alimony payments. Elliott, left alone in Southern California, took up photography as "a way to buy biscuits". He worked first as a darkroom assistant, printing movie stars' pictures other people had taken. Soon, he bought a Rolleiflex and started taking his own, beginning with pictures of his dentist. Then, "Henri Cartier Bresson's picture of a train depot jumped out at me. I had never reacted to a photo like that before – the mood, the tight rectangular composition, the casualness of it. It was a scene available to anyone. You didn't need anything special except your own personal equipment for noticing things. It was a revelation." As was the black and white. He still refuses to use colour in his non-commercial work. "Colour film is more about narrative and storytelling. Photographs are a synthesis. My photographs are more of a drawing than a painting." (Sometimes he uses the byline Snaps Pikazo.)

"In a good photograph, the essentials are there and you don't need all the other stuff." Certainly none of those computer things: Photography should be observation, not manipulation, he says – he loathes Photoshop, and prefers not to crop, because a good photograph is perfectly framed in the first place. Even so, writes Charles Flowers, a writer and ghostwriter who provides the text in Snaps, "for all of his devotion to chance, he meets each snap at least halfway." Elliott thinks waiting for pictures is a kind of manipulation, but he's also not above tweaking: For a museum picture of men looking at a female nude, next to a woman looking at a female clothed, he "moved them around a bit." And those famous jumping dogs? He barks, they jump. Snap.

He moved to New York in 1946, and introduced himself to three photographic greats: Edward Steichen at the Museum of Modern Art, Rod Stryker and Robert Capa, "who was running this little agency I'd never heard of." All thought the work of the man who "just takes pictures" exceptional. He signed up for the Army in 1951 and for Magnum - Capa's agency - two years later. Since then, the commercial and the "hobby" – as he refers to the award-winning body of work – have co-existed harmoniously, taking it in turns to fund each other, and doing it well: the Erwitts live between New York and the Hamptons, each home bearing two life-size plaster Japanese policemen at the entrance.

Erwitt sees comedy in most things, and then some more, because he's watching and waiting for it: A gull and aeroplane with parallel lines, each one's form mirroring the other, a woman's jutting bosom aping her dog's pedigree snout. As a wedding present, he often gives a scene from a Siberian registry office, where two newlyweds gaze at a smirking James Dean figure lounging in the chair next to them. Elliott thinks it's funny, but also that it says much about the uncertainties of marriage. "Some people think my pictures are sad, some think they're funny," he wrote in the 1998 collection Personal Exposures. "Funny and sad, aren't they really the same thing? They add up to normality." If there is comedy in his work, it's also the human, divine kind.

Not that he won't supply the funny anecdotes of a 50-year veteran: The Shah of Iran wore platform heels ("You could tell from the pant creases"). Che Guevara was good-looking but not charming, Marilyn Monroe the opposite. One notorious image – the "kitchen debate" of Richard Nixon and Nikita Kruschev arguing at a Westinghouse exhibit – almost didn't happen because he was laughing too hard: Kruschev told Nixon to "Go screw my grandmother" in Russian, which the child of Boris and Evgenia understood perfectly.

There are no captions in Snaps, beyond place and date, because a good photograph shouldn't need one. There are chapter headings, supposed to reflect life's natural compartments – Look, Tell, Stand, Move, Rest – but they were the designer's idea. The reason he is most proud of the opening photograph – a black man drinking at a fountain marked "colored" – is because "it tells you the whole business. It's very economical, very obvious, very sharp." But because Elliott doesn't bother trying to explain his pictures (he thinks curators write in "museumese"), he can be surprised by what they tell people. He describes the water fountain shot as "a very violent image," but Flowers found it funny. "Elliott was horrified. But I had been there, a boy in the South who was surprised and disappointed when the Colored fountain in the downtown dry-goods store shot up water that was perfectly clear rather than hued like a rainbow."

"I guess if you take a picture and you want to have a certain meaning," Erwitt now reflects, "and people get that meaning, that's nice. Otherwise people can like my photos on any level and I'm happy."

Some don't, of course. He has been accused of whimsy, old-fashioned sweetness, irrelevance. In 1998, a reviewer wrote, "there is a price to be paid for this popular charm, so light on the eye, so hard to achieve. All those years with Magnum, and Elliott Erwitt is better known for a single shot of a bug-eyed Chihuahua than for any reportage from the great plains of human history." No longer. "Treasure this collection," writes Elliot's friend Murray Sayle in the introduction to Snaps. "It's destined to become a classic, because the times and technologies that made it possible will never come again." The sharp-eyed man has finally delivered a panoramic of those great plains of history. And the dot on the horizon, Leica in hand? That'll be Elliott.

Published in the Independent on Sunday Review
21/10/2001

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Iraq: No More Photos Of Bombings

May 16, 2007
By Daryl Lang (PDN)

In another impediment to the news coverage of the Iraq war, an Iraqi government official says photographers and videographers will be banned from the scenes of bombings.

Iraqi police enforced the new rule Tuesday, firing shots into the air to disperse journalists who gathered after a bomb went off in Baghdad's Tayaran Square, according to the Associated Press.

If enforced, the rule will have the greatest impact on Iraqi journalists. In the most dangerous parts of the country, international journalists are usually embedded with U.S. military units for security reasons. Wire services and other major news agencies employ local staff to gather news in the field.

The ban was announced Sunday, according to wire service reports that quoted Brig. Gen. Abdel Karim Khalaf, operations director of Iraq's Interior Ministry.

"We do not want evidence to be disturbed before the arrival of detectives, the ministry must respect human rights and does not want to expose victims and does not want to give terrorists information that they achieved their goals," Khalaf told Agence France Presse. "This decision does not imply a curtailment of press freedom, it is a measure followed all over the world."

Press advocacy group Reporters Without Borders criticized the new rule. "It is vital that journalists can report on the security situation throughout the country without it being seen as incitement to violence. When the streets become impassable and the authorities provide no information about the attacks in real time, the role of the reporter becomes essential. Coverage of these attacks allows people to evaluate the security risk and to avoid dangerous areas," says a statement from the organization.

While the photo ban is a new development, authorities in Iraq have been suspicious about photojournalists at bomb scenes, claiming that the journalists may have advance knowledge of insurgent attacks.

After Reuters photojournalist Ali Omar Abrahem al-Mashhadani was arrested by the U.S. military in 2005, a military spokesperson said journalists who frequently appear at bombing scenes are sometimes detained for questioning. Mashhadani was held for five months and released.

Similarly, the military cited bombing photographs by AP photojournalist Bilal Hussein as one of the reasons he is being detained as a security threat. He has now been held for 13 months.

A complete listing of AP's Pulitzer Prize Winners

The Associated Press has won 49 Pulitzer Prizes, more than any other news organization in categories for which it can compete. The AP has won 19 Pulitzer Prizes for writing and 30 Pulitzer Prizes for pictures.

The Pulitzer Prizes, American journalism's most prestigious honor, were established by Joseph Pulitzer and are presented annually for outstanding achievement.
Here is a list of The Associated Press winners:

2007 - Oded Balilty for his photo of a Jewish settler struggling with an Israeli security officer during a clash that erupted as authorites evacuted the West Bank settlement outpost of Amona.

2005 -Bilal Hussein, Karim Kadim, BrennanLinsley, Jim MacMillan, Samir Mizban, Khalid Mohammed, John B. Moore , Muhammad Muheisen, Anja Niedringhaus, Murad Sezer and Mohammed Uraibi for breaking news photography for a stunning series of pictures of bloody yearlong combat inside Iraqi cities.

2001 -Alan Diaz for his photo of a federal agent in riot gear during a pre-dawn raid in Miami, confronting a man holding Elian Gonzalez in a closet.

2000 -Sang-Hun Choe, Charles J. Hanley, Martha Mendoza and Randy Herschaft for Investigative Reporting, for "The Bridge at No Gun Ri," a package of stories reporting the mass killings of South Korean civilians by American troops at the start of the Korean War..

1999 -J. Scott Applewhite, Roberto Borea, Khue Bui, Robert F. Bukaty, Ruth Fremson, Greg Gibson, Ron Heflin, Charles Krupa, Wilfredo Lee, Dan Loh, Joe Marquette, Pablo Martinez Monsivais, Doug Mills, Stephan Savoia and Susan Walsh, Feature Photography, for a series of pictures of the events surrounding President Clinton's impeachment.

1999 -Sayyid Azim, Jean-Marc Bouju, Dave Caulkin, Brennan Linsley, John McConnico and Khalil Senosi, Spot News Photography, for a series of pictures after the U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.

1997 -Alexander Zemlianichenko, for his photo of Russian President Boris Yeltsin dancing at a rock concert in Rostov before elections.

1996 -Charles Porter IV, for his photo of a fireman cradling an infant victim of the Oklahoma City bombing.

1995 -Mark Fritz, for reports on the ethnic violence in Rwanda.

1995 -Jackie Arzt, Javier Bauluz, Jean-Marc Bouju, Karsten Thielker for photos of the ethnic violence in Rwanda.

1993 -J. Scott Applewhite, Richard Drew, Greg Gibson, David Longstreath, Doug Mills, Marcia Nighswander, Amy Sancetta, Stephan Savoia, Reed Saxon and Lynne Sladky for a series of pictures from the 1992 U.S. presidential campaign.

1992 -Olga Shalygin, Liu Heung Shing, Czarek Sokolowski, Boris Yurchenko and Alexander Zemlianichenko, for a series of pictures on the attempted coup in the Soviet Union and the collapse of the Communist regime.

1991 -Greg Marinovich, for a series of pictures showing the brutal killing of a man believed to be a Zulu Inkatha supporter in South Africa.

1983 -Bill Foley, for a series of pictures of victims and survivors of the massacre of Palestinians in a refugee camp in Beirut.

1982 -Saul Pett, for a series of stories on the bureaucracy of the federal government.

1982 -Ron Edmonds, for a series of pictures showing the attempted assassination of President Reagan.

1978 -J. Ross Baughman, for a series of pictures showing white Rhodesian soldiers beating and torturing black nationalist guerrillas.

1977 -Neal Ulevich, for a series of pictures showing bloody fighting between police and left-wing students in Bangkok, Thailand.

1977 -Walter R. Mears, for reports on the 1976 presidential campaign and election.

1974 -Anthony K. Roberts, for his picture sequence made during an alleged kidnapping attempt in Hollywood.

1974 -Slava (Sal) Veder, for a picture of a U.S. Air Force officer being greeted by his family after being held a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

1973 -Huynh Cong (Nick) Ut, for a picture of a Vietnamese girl fleeing in terror after a napalm attack.

1972 -Horst Faas and Michel Laurent, for a series of pictures of tortures and executions in Bangladesh.

1970 -Steve Starr, for a picture of armed black students emerging after their 36-hour occupation of a Cornell University building.

1969 -Edward (Eddie) Adams, for a picture of Vietnamese Brig. Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner on a Saigon street.

1967 -Jack Thornell, for a picture of James Meredith falling after being hit by a shotgun blast near Hernando, Miss.

1966 -Peter Arnett, for war reports from Vietnam.

1965 -Horst Faas, for photos from Vietnam.

1964 -Malcolm Browne, for war reports from Vietnam, including the overthrow of the Diem regime.

1962 -Paul Vathis, for a picture of President Kennedy and former President Eisenhower walking at Camp David following an unsuccessful 1961 Cuban invasion.

1961 -Lynn Heinzerling, for reports on the early stages of the Congo crisis and analysis of other African events.

1958 -Relman Morin, for reports on school desegregation rioting at Little Rock.

1954 -Mrs. Walter M. Schau, for a photo of a thrilling rescue in Redding, Calif.

1953 -Don Whitehead, for a story on President-elect Eisenhower's secret trips to Korea.

1952 -John Hightower, for reporting of international affairs.

1951 -Max Desfor, for a picture of Korean War refugees in flight over ruins of a Taedong River bridge.

1951 -Relman Morin and Don Whitehead, for war reports from Korea.

1947 -Arnold Hardy, for his photo of a girl leaping to death in a hotel fire.

1947 -Eddy Gilmore, for news reports from Russia, especially an interview with Joseph Stalin.

1945 -Hal Boyle, for columns and stories from the North African and European war theaters.

1945 -Joe Rosenthal, for a picture of Marines raising the U.S. flag on Iwo Jima.

1944 -Daniel DeLuce, for a series of stories from Yugoslavia disclosing the strength of the Tito movement.

1944 -Frank Filan, for a picture of a blasted Japanese pillbox on Tarawa.

1943 -Frank Noel, for a picture of a survivor of a torpedo attack begging for water in a lifeboat.

1942 -Laurence E. Allen, for war reporting, especially stories on the bombing of the British aircraft carrier Illustrious.

1939 -Louis P. Lochner, for news reports from Nazi Germany.

1937 -Howard W. Blakeslee, for reporting on the Harvard Tercentenary celebration.

1933 -Francis A. Jamieson, for a news beat on finding the body of the kidnapped Lindbergh baby.

1922 -Kirke L. Simpson, for a series of stories on the burial of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery.

Court Rejects Right of Publicity Claim of Marilyn Monroe Heirs

May 09, 2007
By David Walker (PDN)

A federal court in New York has rejected the claim of Marilyn Monroe’s estate that it owns rights of publicity in the actress’s likenesses, including photographs. In addition to undercutting a lawsuit against a photo archive for unauthorized commercial use of a Monroe photograph, the decision opens the door for anyone to use Monroe images commercially without permission from the estate.

The estate, MMLLC, and its licensing agency, CMG Worldwide, sued the Shaw Family Archives and its agent, Bradford Licensing Associates in 2005. The suit alleged commercial use of Marilyn Monroe’s likeness without permission, in violation of Indiana’s right of publicity law. Among the alleged violations was a t-shirt, purchased at an Indiana Target store, bearing an image of Monroe credited to the Shaw Family Archives.

For years, MMLLC has collected fees for commercial use of Monroe’s likeness, on the grounds that it owns Monroe’s rights of publicity. Those commercial licensing fees are separate from (and in addition to) usage fees that licensees pay to the copyright holders of the images.

The Shaw Family Archives, owned and operated by the three children of the late Monroe photographer Sam Shaw, responded to MMLLC’s lawsuit by challenging the validity of the estate’s right-of-publicity claims.

MMLLC argued that it had controlling interest in Monroe’s rights of publicity because of a transfer clause in the actress’s will. But SAF argued that Monroe couldn’t pass those rights along in her will, because they were non-existent at the time of her death.
The federal court in New York agreed.

So-called postmortem (or after death) rights of publicity exist by law in some states but not others. The Indiana law didn’t apply, the court ruled, because Monroe never lived there, and because the Indiana law was enacted in 1994—long after Monroe’s death in 1962.

It is a matter of debate whether Monroe was a resident of New York or California at the time of her death in 1962. But California didn’t enact a postmortem right of publicity law until 1984, and New York still doesn’t have one. Since neither of those states had rights of publicity laws on the books at the time of Monroe’s death, the court ruled, she never had any publicity rights to pass on to heirs or beneficiaries.

“Any publicity laws she enjoyed during her lifetime were extinguished at her death by operation of law,” the judge wrote in her decision. MMLLC argued that the Indiana law conferred publicity rights after Monroe’s death, but the judge dismissed that argument as “untenable.”

“We’re beside ourselves…this is a big boost, because a lot of people wouldn’t do [business] with us before,” says Meta Shaw Stevens, who owns Shaw Family Archives with her sister Edith Shaw Marcus and her brother Larry Shaw. She explains that “in the past, [our clients] had to pay a tremendous amount of money to CMG, which left very little money for photos. Now companies can come to us, and they don’t have to pay CMG.”

Through spokesperson Michael Nagel, CMG declined to comment about the ruling. It is unknown whether the company will appeal
According to Christopher Serbagi, who represented SFA along with Sam Shaw’s grandson David Marcus, CMG lobbied for the enactment of Indiana’s right of publicity law, hoping to bestow rights of publicity on celebrities and their heirs no matter where they lived (CMG represents various celebrities and celebrity estates).

“[MMLLC and CMG] took a big risk and lost” in deciding to test the Indiana law and their right of publicity claims, says Serbagi.
Users of Monroe images usually capitulate to CMG’s demands, rather than take on the cost and risk of a legal battle, Serbagi says.
But the Shaw family decided to fight, Meta Stevens says, because “we didn’t have very much to lose. If we had lost, we would have been where we were.” Most of the legal work, she says, was done by her nephew, David Marcus.

“It’s the David and Goliath story. My nephew worked feverishly on behalf of his grandfather and other photographers in a similar situation. He’s a one man operation up against a mega law firm, and something good happened.”

Serbagi says SFA is now pursuing its counter-claims against CMG. “We intend to vigorously pursue them for interfering with our business relationships, and for causing us financial damage,” he says.

Travel Photo-Essay

ruwi township in Muscat.Oman.2007

Travel Photo-Essay

old palace in Muscat. Oman.2007

Russian Photojournalist Dmitry Chebotayev Killed In Iraq

May 07, 2007
By Daryl Lang (PDN)

Photojournalist Dmitry Chebotayev was killed in a bombing Sunday while on assignment in Iraq, according to news reports and his agency, World Picture News.

Chebotayev was traveling with U.S. forces in Diyala province when their vehicle was hit by an improvised explosive device. Six American soldiers were killed and two were wounded, according to the U.S. military. Russian news organizations identified Chebotayev as one of the casualties on Monday.

Chebotayev was covering the war for Russian Newsweek and had been in Iraq since March. He was in his late 20s; different reports listed his age as 27 or 29.

"Everyone here loved him, and loved working with him. He was a cheerful person who loved life," Russian Newsweek editor Leonid Parfyonov told the Associated Press.

"While Dmitry was an experienced conflict photographer, he was killed at a time and place where experience means so little for members of the press," said WpN editorial director Carlo Montali in an e-mail. "As a photo contributor to WpN, people in contact with him at the agency remember Dmitry as a positive and thoughtful person."

This was Chebotayev's first trip to Iraq and he was scheduled to return home to Moscow soon, Montali said. Chebotayev has also covered conflicts in Chechnya and the Middle East.

The Committee to Protect Journalists' Web site has counted 100 working journalists killed in Iraq since March 2003, a figure not yet updated to include Chebotayev. Most of the deaths have been local journalists, many of whom were singled out and executed by gunmen.

IEDs are a constant danger in Iraq and have hurt journalists before, including the much-publicized attack in January 2006 that injured ABC News anchor Bob Woodruff. In the past week alone, separate roadside bombings have killed at least 14 U.S. troops and wounded 23, according to news releases from the military.

Call for Proposals: Documentary Photography Distribution Grant

A Grant to Encourage New Ways of Presenting Documentary Photography to the Public

OSI's Documentary Photography Project seeks applicants for a grant that encourages documentary photographers to propose new ways of using photography as an advocacy tool. The grant enables photographers who have already completed a significant body of work on issues of social justice to collaborate with a partner organization and present the work to targeted audiences to stimulate positive social change.

All photographers must have another entity (such as a nonprofit or community-based organization) that agrees to collaborate with the photographer to present the work in innovative ways and to reach out to specific communities to advocate for social change. The partner must engage with the photographer to accomplish these goals—and not just fund or publish the project.

Grants of $5,000 to $30,000 will be awarded.

Traditional media offer limited opportunities for presenting documentary photographs in a way that fosters social change. The Open Society Institute's Documentary Photography Project supports photographers, working in collaboration with a partner organization, to present their work to specific audiences to stimulate positive social change.

All photographers must have another entity (such as a nonprofit or community-based organization) that agrees to collaborate with the photographer to present the work in innovative ways and to reach out to specific communities to advocate for social change. The partner must engage with the photographer to accomplish these goals—and not just fund or publish the project.

Grants of $5,000 to $30,000 will be awarded.

Eligibility
Proposals must present strong images that are contextualized, when necessary, with words, sound, or other media.
Proposals must address a current social justice issue. Preference will be given to work that coincides with the issues and geographical areas that concern OSI.
Proposals must use creative and appropriate strategies to present the work to the public.
Proposals must engage a specific audience or community.
Applicants must partner with an organization that will provide programmatic and financial support.
The following projects are not eligible for funding:

Projects that involve the making of new photographs;
Projects whose only goal is to raise awareness in a general way;
Books absent an advocacy use for the publication;
Gallery exhibitions that serve only the interests of the photographer or the gallery;
Documentary film.
OSI cannot support lobbying activities. Projects that include lobbying activities will not be funded. OSI does not discriminate on the basis of gender, race, religion, ethnicity, or sexual orientation.

Application, Review, and Selection Process
To apply, log in to the OSI Online Application System at https://oas.soros.org/oas and submit completed application by Friday, July 6, 2007, at 5:00 p.m. EST. Semi-finalists will be selected in mid-September and may be contacted at that time with requests for additional information. Applicants will be notified by mail and grant recipients will be announced in late November.

Application Checklist
A complete application consists of responses to all required fields in the following 7 sections of the online application:

Applicant Information (enter contact information and upload resume)
Project Summary (enter answers to all 4 questions describing your project)
Applicant Questions (answer and upload all 7 questions as a Word document)
Partner Organization Questions (enter contact information, upload letter of support, and answer and upload all 4 questions as a Word document)
Budget (enter answers to all 3 questions and upload itemized budget)
Examples of Work (upload 15 low-res jpegs, captions, and accompanying text)
Letters of recommendation (enter contact information and upload letters of recommendation from 2 references)
Deadline
Complete online applications must be submitted no later than Friday, July 6, 2007, at 5:00 p.m. EST.

Contact
If you have any questions, please contact Whitney Johnson at whjohnson@sorosny.org.

Your Friend Flickr?

Blog editors note: Flickr is blocked in United Arab Emirates by the Govt.

May 02, 2007
By Daryl Lang
From the May issue of PDN.

Ryan Brenizer landed a job covering events for Wired.com. Paul Wilcock licensed his concert photos to a few newspapers. Hamad Darwish got an assignment to shoot desktop backgrounds for Microsoft Windows.

What did these photographers do to drum up work? Almost nothing. They uploaded their photos to Flickr and the work found them.

Flickr went online in 2004 as a powerful yet easy-to-use program for storing and sharing personal images. It was acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. Today it leads a double life as a hugely popular site for amateurs to share personal snapshots, and as a growing marketplace for licensing photo rights.

With millions of keyworded pictures, the site resembles a big stock library. Photo buyers praise the quality of the photographs and the ease of the Flickr search engine. Professional shooters say the site's forums are a good source of tips and inspiration. Joining the site is free, and with so much traffic it seems like a logical place to set up shop.

But Flickr has done little if anything to welcome professionals. It offers no e-commerce features. It expressly forbids commercial uses of its site. "If we find you selling products, services, or yourself through your photostream, we will terminate your account," its guidelines read. Many of its users happily give their photos away for free.

Transactions that take place off the site are not forbidden, however. Flickr neither encourages nor discourages art buyers from e-mailing photographers to ask for photos, a spokesperson says.

Members say such e-mails are on the rise. Flickr's forums bustle with discussions about requests users get for their images, and how much to charge.

Sherri Jackson, a Flickr member who says she shoots for fun and personal expression, noticed more people contacting her in the last few months asking to use her images.

"I get more requests every week and it's exciting to learn how people wish to use my images," she says. "I like the fact that my work can be out there and available and I really don't have to do anything to market myself."

Another Flickr member to notice this trend is Matthew Blake Powers, a graduate of architecture school who takes photographs as a hobby. "Many times, the e-mails I receive are very casual and get to the point. They simply state who they are, what image they are interested in, and how/why they would like to use it," Powers says.

In one case, someone designing the annual report for the Milwaukee Art Museum e-mailed Powers seeking to use one of his photos on the cover. After researching how much to charge, and weighing the fact that he never had anything published before, Powers decided to ask $250. To Powers' disappointment, the museum selected another cover.

Paul Buckley, vice president and executive art director for Penguin, uses Flickr to find photographs, something he mentioned in a story about book publishing in PDN's March issue.

"I use Flickr as any other stock photo source with a search engine," Buckley says. "That may not be its intended purpose, but it works beautifully, and the site has a smart, powerful search engine." Penguin recently used a Flickr photograph on a book cover.

There is no way to know how much business is conducted through Flickr. One member claims a major ad agency paid him $2,500 to use a Flickr photo as a background in an unaired TV commercial. Darwish's job for Microsoft, shooting landscapes to be included with Windows Vista as desktop wallpaper, was almost certainly a multi-thousand-dollar job.

At the other extreme, some blogs and small companies ask to use Flickr photos for free. Some don't even ask.

"I think a lot of companies are using it as kind of a fishing site for cheap stuff from people without a lot of experience," says Jim Hunter, a stock and assignment photographer and editor of StockPhotographer.info. But even Hunter posts work on Flickr, which he says drives a fair amount of traffic to his professional site. His wife also uses Flickr to share family photos.

Brenizer, who has been shooting events like the New York Comic Con for Wired.com thanks to a Flickr connection, joined the site as a casual member a few years ago. Brenizer credits the site's message boards with teaching him to be a better photographer and jumpstarting his photo career.

"The passion just totally captured me," he says. "There's that positive reinforcement of all the people on there. . . . Then the people who contacted me started to be clients."

A former newspaper editor, Brenizer now works in the publications office of the Columbia University Teachers College, where a large part of his job is shooting photographs. On his own time, he shoots weddings and events, and he spent a week as the photographer-in-residence at a biological research center—all jobs he got through Flickr. "I've never solicited, I've never done any advertising," he says.

Flickr has made some photographers into cult celebrities. David Hobby, a Baltimore Sun staff photographer, publishes a blog about lighting called Strobist. To complement the blog, he started a Flickr group so his readers could share advice and photos.

The Strobist group spun out of control and now has more than 7,100 members, who post dozens of messages a day. Hobby doesn't have time to answer all the questions people send him. A lighting seminar he organized sold out weeks in advance.

Hobby says he is impressed by how good Flickr photographers are, pointing to the Strobist photo pool. "Almost every one of those pictures has earning potential," he says.

Like a lot of Flickr fans, Hobby thinks it's only a matter of time before the service finds a way to monetize this collection of talent. "You don't sit on a big oil well and not drill down eventually," he says.

A Flickr spokesperson would not comment on future plans. For now, Flickr makes money off advertising and by selling upgraded memberships for a small annual fee. It has some direct competitors (including Zoomr, SmugMug and Photobucket) but none with the kind of popularity and goodwill Flickr has achieved.

Flickr allows members to set free usage terms by attaching Creative Commons tags to images, so a logical next step might be to let users set prices for certain kinds of usage. Another strategy could be to partner with an existing stock photography site, perhaps one of the royalty-free micropayment sites that also appeal to semi-professional shooters.

Or it could do nothing.

To better understand Flickr's future, it may be helpful to step back and look at how Yahoo! and its investors view the site.

In earnings calls and media interviews, no one asks Yahoo! executives how they're going to make money off photographs. Instead, the buzz is all about "Web 2.0," the user-generated, community-focused sites that have attracted huge audiences. Sites like Flickr, MySpace and YouTube are hot because they engage people in a way that traditional media increasingly cannot.

Yahoo! recently began requiring Flickr members to use the same ID to log in to Flickr as they use for other services like Yahoo! Mail. As a result, the company can collect more information about users and their online behavior.

To Yahoo!, Flickr's value is not its photography, but rather the desirable audience it attracts for advertisers and marketers. This may explain Flickr's failure to embrace, denounce, or even officially care about the pro community.

Somehow, Flickr has created a marketplace for professional photography and made it look like an accident.

Publications Fumble With "Disgusting" Virginia Tech Photo

© Alan Kim/The Roanoke Times
Many newspapers ran Kim's photo unedited, but some publications altered the image.

April 26, 2007
By Daryl Lang (PDN)

Another week, another lesson about image manipulation in the press.

At least two major publications – The New York Post and People – digitally obscured a portion of a photo from the Virginia Tech shootings.

In the photo, emergency personnel are seen carrying injured student Kevin Sterne out of the Norris Hall classroom building, his clothes soaked with blood. Standards being what they are, the concern about the photograph was not the shocking amount of blood, but whether the student's penis was visible.

The photo is one of several taken at the scene of the April 16 shooting by Roanoke Times photographer Alan Kim and transmitted hours later worldwide by the Associated Press. It appeared the next day in dozens of newspapers, in many cases on the front page.

Almost immediately, newspaper readers began to debate the image. A message board devoted to the Detroit Free Press sparked a debate the next morning over whether the picture actually showed genitalia. The Hartford Courant was bombarded with complaints, many of which reader representative Karen Hunter posted online.

"You are showing his penis right on the front page," one Courant reader complained to Hunter. "I think that's disgusting.... I think you should have blocked it out or something."

Over at the New York Post, editors anticipated that exact response. The Post ran the picture big and in color, but cloned out the flesh-colored shape protruding from the student's lap. Across town, the archrival Daily News ran the picture unedited.

People edited the photo, while its sister magazine Time ran the picture unedited.

By April 18, sharp-eyed bloggers had flagged some of the news outlets that altered the photo. Both Poynter and the National Press Photographers Association – whose code of ethics prohibits digital alterations to news photographs in most cases – posted stories about the photo on their Web sites.

In response, Post executive editor Col Allen told Poynter, "We decided to make a very minor alteration to the photograph of Kevin Sterne being carried out of Norris Hall to protect the wounded student's dignity but in no way change the news impact of the picture."

People director of photography Chris Dougherty told PDN, "[O]ur sentiments closely resemble those stated in the article by the Post's editor, Col Allan."

The Sun newspaper in London also edited the picture in a similar away, according to the NPPA.

Did the picture actually show a penis? Roanoke Times photo editor Dan Beatty told the Courant, "We checked it out, checked it out, and checked it out again because we got that same question. What you see sticking up on his lap is a tourniquet. Unfortunately, the picture is fuzzy enough that it raised the question.... We appreciate that people want to know and care that we showed respect and decency for the young man. They should also know that he is doing fine and has the picture hanging up on his wall."

This case of manipulation differs from other recent examples in that it was done by editors for reasons of taste, rather than by photographers for reasons of aesthetics. Alterations to an image in The New York Times and to multiple images in The Toledo Blade were disclosed by the newspapers earlier this month.