The dark side of user-generated content: Lara Jade, a 17-year-old Flickr photographer, discovered that a vampish self-portrait she made at age 14 had been ripped off for the cover art of a porn DVD. She tells the story in a Flickr post and asks for help. She writes:
Please could someone help me with this? It feels like I'm pulling at loose strings and that I have no power over people like this. I'm still only 17 and trying to make my way in photography. I feel like I cannot display this picture anymore in case someone knows it from the movie.. or even the fact that someone THINKS im in the movie and it gives me a bad name..
A Thomas Hawk post led me to this photographer, her image, her story… all encapsulated in one Flickr blog post. Maybe the most significant thing I’ve learned in photo wandering over the past few days is the fact that Flickr is a blog aggregator. When I started looking at Flickr last year, I thought of it as an assemblage of photo albums with tags. It didn’t occur to me that someone’s photo stream actually streamed through a feed. I saw comments under images, but only minimal text from the photographer. Stumbling into Rebekka’s photo stream showed me that photographers might include extended text, not just captions. I finally got it! Flickr is a photo blog. Now I’m on the lookout for photo blogs that go beyond the scrapbook mode, blogs that have some ambition about discussing photography and image-making.
The launch vehicle in Hawk’s post was this quote about photo ethics: “I hope that whoever is responsible for the theft of this image pays dearly for what they have done. This is worse than most image theft and is a violation of Lara's human spirit.”
Image theft. A bane to photographers, also to the subjects of photos who are not involved in the social contract implicit in the photograph. In Lara Jade’s case, photographer and subject are one and the same. Consider how “violation of the human spirit” also applies to the blind woman in Paul Strand’s famous 1916 photograph.
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