We found one of my 1980s museum posters for sale on Ebay for $550, “shipped with nice vintage glass and metal frame frame.” Can’t wait to see that vintage glass! (Not really.) Dare I say, “Cheap at the price?” You can read more about the image and my poster here.
New York, New York © Harold Davis
Related story: Halloween in the New York that Was.
I have “minted” two NFTs—non-fungible tokens. To break this down a little further, to mint an asset such as a digital file means to place it on the blockchain. Placing the asset—the NFT—on the blockchain also generally means in the case of digital art to associate it with ability to buy and sell it using cryptocurrency, most often with digital art, Ethereum.
Just saying, you can make NFTs out of things that have nothing to do with art. Just saying, a JPEG file minted into an NFT recently sold for $69 Million via the Christie’s Auction House. Just saying, what can you do with this thing besides buying and selling it (you can’t hang it on your wall)?
My first NFT is Petal Pushing, a GIF file. The description reads “This is a hand-created artisinal GIF file forged in Photoshop from a series of LAB L-channel inversion light box petal images by free-range artist and photographer Harold Davis.” The “Buy It Now” price is 0.5 Ethereum (or about $850 at today’s exchange rate). You can check it out here on Rarible, and here on OpenSea.
Petal Pushing © Harold Davis
My second NFT is Harold Davis—Petal Circles.gif, another GIF file. The description reads “This is a hand-created artisinal GIF file forged in Photoshop from a series of light box petal images by artist and photographer Harold Davis.” The “Buy It Now” price is one Ethereum (or about $1700 at today’s exchange rate). You can check it out here on Rarible, and here on OpenSea.
Harold Davis—Petal-Circles.gif © Harold Davis
They are such a bargain, compared to $69 Million at least. Just saying. And just to be clear, what are you buying? You can’t put it on the wall. You are buying the one minted copy, but it can still be digitally copied and displayed. And, you are not buying my copyright in the image or its components. So, this is literally a trading vehicle—which can be said for some art editions, and some original art, as well!
More thoughtfully, I did have a few minutes back in the 2000 aughts when I was just starting as a digital artist and photographer when I considered whether there really was a reason to make a physical manifestation of an image. Then I fell in love with physical printmaking, making books, and all the old-fashioned stuff.
Phyllis came over to my work station as I was going through the software gyrations to load up my digital wallet with Ethereum and pay for the “minting.” She said, and I quote, “Just what do you think you are doing?”
She has a point. But I’m going to stick with it a bit, and so far have enjoyed my first venture on the blockchain, with cybercurrency, and with minting NFTs.
Flowers with Dances and Delights © Harold Davis
My new book Creative Garden Photography is due out from Rocky Nook towards the end of the summer 2020 and is now available for pre-order. The book features garden photography from around the world, some of my best flower images and how they were made, and techniques for use in the field (the garden), close-up, and botanicals in the studio (light box, on black, etc). Phyllis and I are working hard on writing and designing this book, and we think it will be very beautiful (as well as practical and useful).
Creative Garden Photography will be available from the publisher, Rocky Nook, on Amazon, and “wherever fine books are sold.”
We are offering for a limited time your choice of one these four photographs by Harold Davis of Claude Monet’s legendary Garden at Giverny, France at a very special price. They are Giverny Afternoon, Flowers at Giverny, Giverny (Bridge), and Red Tulip, Giverny. The images are shown below.
Each print is on 13″ X 17″ paper (the image size is a slightly less than the paper size), hand printed in my studio on wonderful Moab Juniper Baryta extra premium photographic paper, and personally signed by me.
Your print of choice is $295, approximately a 75% discount from our normal retail price for a print of this size of $1,200. $30 shipping within the US (please inquire for international shipping). Sales tax also applies.
Click here to read more!
Flowers at Giverny © Harold Davis
This is a promotional piece sent out on behalf of my studio via Agency Access, a marketing list service for creatives.
We are looking for a hands-on intern with a serious interest in art and photography. The position will pay a modest stipend and/or garner academic credit (to be arranged depending on the individual situation). Please feel free to pass this post on if you know someone you think would be right!
Here’s are some more details:
Harold Davis Art & Photography, located in Berkeley, California, is the business arm representing Harold Davis, an internationally recognized artist and photographer whose work is exhibited, collected, and licensed widely. Harold Davis is an experienced and widely sought-after workshop leader, and the author of many books related to art and photography from publishers including Random House, Monacelli Press, and Focal Press. Our website is www.digitalfieldguide.com.
We seek an intern who is a self-starter, reliable, organized, and interested in hands-on art and photography. Primary duties will include assisting with printmaking, handmade artist book collation, work on studio design projects, and general studio duties. We are looking for an intern who can commit to ten hours per week. We are hoping that this internship will also qualify for academic credit, and to that end will supervise the interface between a creative project of the intern and real world implementation of said project.
Applicants should make contact by email with a resume, cover letter, brief statement of what they hope to get out of the internship, and (if available) a link to an online portfolio.
Bouquet of Neighborhood Flowers © Harold Davis
As a successful professional artist and photographer—and, not entirely coincidentally, a business person—I am aware that sometimes you have to spend money to make money. Sensible investment is after all the cornerstone of business life, and this is no different for a business as an artist than for any other kind of business. Although, as one art dealer I’ve worked with said, “Artists work twice as hard as anyone else, because they have the work of being an artist, and the entirely separate work of making a living as an artist.”
Et chorus sinit ire cum flores (white) © Harold Davis
In the light of spending money to make money, I am not entirely opposed to upfront pay-for-play business models in the arts, such as paying fees to enter contests, paying to join an exhibit, or paying to be included in a directory of artists or photographers. There’s a slippery slope here, and I do advise casting a skeptical eye on these kinds of opportunities, particularly if they are regarded strictly as business opportunities. Which they are often not, of course: as an artist, one’s work is tightly bound up with one’s sense of self-worth, and any chance to have one’s work displayed or reproduced is an appeal to vanity, often over the common sense of the pocket book. (Pocket book discipline might be more rigorously applied in the context of a non-arts-based business, although a high percentage of new businesses of all sorts do fail, perhaps in part for lack of thrift.)
Kiss from a Rose © Harold Davis
However, what I have little patience with is pay-for-play business models masquerading as something completely different, where the real intent is to take advantage of artists. This brings me to the subject of Vida, also called Shopvida, on the web at www.shopvida.com.
If you have almost any kind of presence as an artist or photographer on the Internet, you’ve likely received an initial email from Vida. The first email I received, from Erica who is a self-described “manager of artist relationships” at VIDA, went as follows:
I am writing today regarding your artwork, with the hope that you will consider collaborating with us. I am writing from VIDA, a Google Ventures backed company that brings artists and makers together from around the world to create original, inspiring apparel in a socially conscious way. We are looking for artists with amazing technical skill and truly original work. We came across your artwork, and we’d love to work with you to translate your art into fashion.
By way of introduction, my name is Erica, and I manage Artist Relations here at VIDA. We specialize in converting 2D art into beautiful, quality apparel and accessories. Also, each of our artists receives a portion of net revenues shared back for each of their designs sold.
As part of our artists recruitment team, I would be thrilled if you would join us as a VIDA artist by submitting your artwork to …. In the meantime, if you have any questions at all, please reply to this email directly. I’d be more than happy to answer any questions you may have.
We would be deeply honored to have the opportunity to work with you.
Much the same tale is told on the ShopVida website:
VIDA’S STORY IS THAT OF THE RICH, INTERCONNECTED WORLD WE LIVE IN — THE STORY OF CONTEMPORARY LIFE AND MINDFUL, GLOBAL CITIZENSHIP.
WE ARE A GLOBAL PARTNERSHIP OF CO-CREATORS, FROM A DESIGNER IN PARIS, TO A PRODUCER IN KARACHI, AND A CONSUMER IN SAN FRANCISCO.
…
We handle production and business, so [our artists] can pursue their passion and make a living.
…
ONE MAKER AT A TIME
LITERACY FOR LIFE
We provide literacy programs to our makers. They learn to read, write, and do basic math and build a better life for generations to come. [capitalization in the original]
So not only was Vida honored to have me, by joining I could make some money, support mindful global citizenship, and also literacy programs. Who was I to say no to this appeal to my artistic vanity and my desire to do good—with the potential to benefit my pocketbook. Surely, a potent brew of benefits. I hemmed and I hawed, and I decided to give this a shot. After all, no payment was requested upfront.
Putting up a shop on Vida is relatively easy and also quite a bit of fun. You use low resolution Jpeg imagery to design items in a number of clothing categories (also bags and pillows).
Harold Davis store on Vida (see text)
You can see the Vida collection that I designed at http://shopvida.com/collections/harold-davis, partly shown above. [Author’s note: I’ve requested Vida take down my store and purge my images, but as of publication date this link is still live.] Once the low resolution store front is in place, you need to upload high resolution versions of the image files, but this isn’t anything that anyone reasonably capable with Photoshop can’t handle.
It was clear as soon as my storefront was up on Vida that the next step would be self-promotion. As I was informed at the top of my new online store as soon as it was live, with ten sales I get “Slate” status—which means that ” Harold’s art will be promoted by VIDA.” Presumably, without the ten sales there would be no promotion of Harold’s art by Vida, sigh!
Just to be clear, I have nothing against involving family, friends, and collectors in social media campaigns that benefit me. In fact, Kickstarter is kind of built around this concept, and I have run two successful Kickstarter campaigns (see https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/472058814/botanique-a-hand-made-book-of-art-prints-by-harold and https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/472058814/monochromatic-visions). It is reasonable to expect family, friends, and social media involvement in the projects that are important to an artist. It becomes a problem if these channels are the sole support of a project, and largely are making money for a third-party who is not the artist.
Kiss from a Rose Wrap
Before deploying my reputational capital on behalf of my Vida collection, I thought it would be a good idea to order an actual product from my shop as a matter of simple quality control. Under Phyllis’s name I bought a “Kiss from a Rose” cashmere silk scarf for $85.00 (it came to over $100 with tax and shipping). As a side note, this sale to myself was the only sale I made via my Vida store.
When the scarf eventually arrived, the reviews were mixed. Delivery took about five weeks, which seemed like a strangely long time. While the scarf seemed expensive to us for what it was, in fairness it was sized quite large. However, in our opinion the fabric didn’t seem as luxurious as the “silk-cashmere” description would seem to imply.
There was no lining. Hemming (on the short side) was adequate, but not particularly elegant or complicated. The long edges of the scarf were not sewn at all, but were simply the selvages of the fabric.
The process by which this was created clearly involved printing on fabric via an inkjet printer. There were some places where the dye didn’t reach the fabric, leaving white spots.
To be clear, I have nothing against printing on fabric with an inkjet printer, particularly when it is done well. But this isn’t exactly an artisanal process, and it is unlikely to be lifting third-world crafts people out of poverty. I’ve used an inkjet printer to print some of my images on canvas, but that doesn’t make these images “genuine oil paintings” any more than Vida’s inkjet products are legitimate third-world textile art.
Spring Wreath © Harold Davis
As my welcome to Vida email noted, the “important tips that have helped Vida designers achieve success” were:
While I waited to evaluate the product sample, the upselling email fun began…often at the rate of several emails a day.
Repeating Flower Pattern © Harold Davis
Cameron at Vida wrote me (many times) to say that if I spent $1,000 I could become “a featured designer with a curated collection. We are only offering curated collections to a small group of hand-picked artists. This is a private email.” Having a curated collection would result in having “[a]t least 1 product from your collection featured on the VIDA Shop All Page. Being Featured on the Shop All page will give you significantly more exposure.”
Jennifer wrote me (on several different days) to “personally reach out to send you a final reminder that today is THE VERY LAST DAY to claim your curated collection page on VIDA.”
Lesley suggested I might enjoy the Festival of Art event where “where art lovers and artists can join together in their admiration for the arts,” and where I would receive a 40% discount on purchases of $900 or more.
Alice sent me another invitation to become a featured designer with a curated collection: “We are only offering curated collections to a small group of hand-picked artists for 1 week only. We think your art is beautiful and we would love the opportunity to feature your work. This is a private, invitation-only email.”
This inundation of upselling emails from Vida continued for quite a while without letup. As one my of my favorite authors, Kurt Vonnegut, might have said, “So it goes.”
Let me try to sum my sense of Vida up. The claim [from an initial email from Erica at Vida] that
Vida is backed by Google Ventures, and artists who get discovered on VIDA are featured everywhere from national television to major press mentions like TechCrunch and the Wall Street Journal….We’d love to work with you to build your artwork into a fashion brand
seems exaggerated—but certainly something that gets my attention as an artist, with its mention of Google and my artwork as a fashion brand, and no more exagerated than the spiel from many another tech startup. This is, however, also a well-crafted appeal to the vanity and optimism of any artist.
The actual business model seems to be more like a blunderbuss than a discovery mechanism for quality art that would work for textile designs. The goal seems to be to see how much product can be moved by the artists to friends and family of the artist. The only mechanism for discovery of great designs is to qualify by selling Vida product to friends and family, and it is far from clear that the promotion that might follow from said sales at Vida would result in any long-term gains in terms of the branding of an artist.
Dragonfly 4 © Harold Davis
At best, this is a pay-for-play business model on Vida’s part. As I’ve noted, I have no problem with the notion of investing in the business of being an artist, provided this investment is made thoughtfully. I also have no issue with using friends and family as part of one’s social media constellation to jumpstart a career. I do have an issue with the lack of upfront clarity on Vida’s part about this being what a store on Vida will entail.
Pay-for-play can be okay, but then you should say right away, “For exposure you must pay!” Essentially, Vida is analagous to a multi-level marketing scheme, where participants only make money by selling the company product to others.
One other aspect of Vida’s workflow is troubling, and that is the production of the actual products. In point of fact, I have a natural outlet for products based on my work via my workshops and other events. Had we believed the merchandise was of a quality that worked with the quality of my work, and that we wouldn’t be ashamed to present to my audience, we could easily have taken advantage of one of the many offers I was pitched. For example, we could have bought $1,000 worth of products based my designs at a 40% discount, and sold these at retail at my workshops.
The problem here had to do with the quality of the printing, which we didn’t think was high enough to compare with my other work. In addition, a zebra doesn’t change its stripes to a leopard’s spots. The deceptive marketing to artists is one of a piece with the deceptive sense that Vida gives that its products, created using inkjet printing, are related to textile craft and somehow artisanal. There is quite a bit of markup in my $85 scarf, and I don’t think this money is going to a dye printing machine operator in India.
Low Geostationary and Decaying Orbits around the Clematis Inversion © Harold Davis
Is Vida an out-and-out scam? This depends upon your definition of “scam,” but probably not, in the sense that they do actually make and ship the products they advertise (even if these aren’t of great quality). Nothing illegal is going on as far as I can tell. Like Amway and Herbalife, there are probably folks who have done okay with Vida—but it wouldn’t be for me.
While not an out-and-out scam, as a customer I would be disappointed in the quality of the work, particularly considering the price, and I would likely be disinclined to order more products from this company. (Would I have expressed my disappointment about the product quality to my sister-in-law-the-artist had I bought a Vida item of hers? Probably not.)
Is this a business model that treats artists ethically and morally? In my opinion, I don’t think so. As always, do research, draw your own conclusions, and caveat emptor.
I submitted a draft of this article to Umaimah Mendhro, the founder and CEO of Vida, and to the press email at Shopvida for comment, but as of publication time have received no response.
Have you had an experience good or bad with Vida? I will happily approve for publication relevant comments related to this article.
Other articles by Harold Davis pertaining to contemporary issues in the business of art and photography: Putting Paid to Purloining Picture Snatchers: Working with Pixsy; What do Harold Davis and Georgia O’Keeffe have in common on Pinterest, and how is Pinterest going to make money, anyway?; and Presentation Matters: Why Book Publishers Should Care About Quality.
About Harold Davis: HAROLD DAVIS is a professional photographer and digital artist whose work is widely collected. He is the author of many bestselling photography books, including Achieving Your Potential As a Photographer, Creating HDR Photos, Photographing Flowers, The Photoshop Darkroom, and The Way of the Digital Photographer.
Quince by Moon © Harold Davis
Roger Horton is the CEO of Taylor & Francis (T&F), one of the world’s largest publishers of academic and professional titles. T&F is one of the companies in the Informa Group, a multi-national player with 6,500 employees world-wide and multi-billion dollar revenues. Here’s part of the Informa mission statement:
We operate in the Knowledge & Information Economy, delivering products and services to commercial and academic customers through an array of media, from digital to print to face-to-face. Through this engagement, we share knowledge, insight and intelligence in specialty topics, and we provide connectivity to expert communities.
T&F has bulked up via acquisitions over the years, with Routledge a major acquisition in 1998, and CRC Press acquired in 2003. More recently, Focal Press, one of my publishers, was acquired. Focal has a very long and distinguished history of publishing photography books since the 1930s, but now has essentially been gutted, with the imprint recast as a division of Routledge.
Getting back to Mr. Horton (as you’ll recall, he is the CEO of the conglomerate that swallowed Focal Press, one of my publishers), in a financial presentation to shareholders, he has stated that “content quality is king: print, e-books, online are merely the delivery tools.”
In other words, content divorced from its presentation is now seen as the key to the publishing kingdom. This content can be sliced, diced, and resold at a profit without having to worry about the high production or inventory cost of decently produced physical books (or the production costs of well-produced e-Books, for that matter).
I don’t want to pick on Mr. Horton too much. It’s hard to argue with the proposition that great content is, well, great. And T&F and Informa are hardly alone among big publishers in wanting to have friction-less profits based on content by itself, without having to worry about the headaches that come from producing and inventorying physical goods. To paraphrase the author Erica Jong, whose first book used the idea in a very different context, this is the dream of “zipless” publishing where virtual stuff—the ideas of experts and academics—becomes spun into monetary value for company shareholders in our physical world.
My new book, Achieving Your Potential As a Photographer: A Photographer’s Creative Companion and Workbook, was published just before Focal Press was gutted by T&F. I am very proud of the content, photographs, design, and production that went into my book. It is the last book that I will be publishing with T&F—despite a multi-book contract with Focal—because the reconstituted company simply doesn’t have a commitment to quality trade book production. My understanding is that the reason T&F has canceled my contracts is because they don’t want to live up to the quality book production standards I had written into the contracts before I signed them in 2014.
In Achieving Your Potential As a Photographer, I strongly urge readers to draw their own creative line in the sand to become the best artists that they can be.
I am the author and producer of 18 bestselling photography books that my wife, Phyllis Davis, has designed. So this is one place as an artist, photographer, and writer that I am drawing my own line in the sand. When it comes to photography books, the quality of the design, reproduction, and book production does matter—a great deal!!!
In fact, generally quality of design is a huge factor in this world, whether one is dealing in old fashioned domains or in high technology. Regarding technology, Steve Jobs’s Apple is a great case in point, showing how quality design and quality physical production add tremendous value to what would otherwise be fairly generic products.
I am committed to working as an artisan across the domains of content production. Whether I am creating books for trade publication, e-Books, fine-art prints, handmade books, or online learning tools, I will only do so with elegance, grace, and style. The timeless idea of quality can be appreciated and will be rewarded whether the mechanisms of production are the latest in high-tech printers, or as ancient as hand-made, one-off construction.
A publisher that willfully ignores the difficult issues of quality in production is definitely off-the-rails. They are looking at books and content in a very shortsighted way, and missing the forest for the trees. Yes, it does take time, money, and effort to get things right—but getting things right is always worth doing.
I am often asked how I deal with the issue of image theft, considering my extensive online presence on my blog and on my Flickr stream. My answer has been that I don’t release high-resolution files except to known reliable clients under contract, and that I expect some image thievery to be taking place with the low-resolution versions I post online. This, I explain, is a little like “spoilage” in a retail store: part of the cost of doing business. Without images online no one will find me, and over the years I have made many new clients via my blog and Flickr. Incidentally, I explain, I don’t watermark my online images because watermarks are ugly, and can easily be cloned out.
Wasp © Harold Davis
It turns out that I have substantially underestimated the prevalence of commercial image theft of my work. Sure, I was aware of quirky uses of my work like the woman who tattooed my cherry blossom branch on her back. But by and large, I didn’t look for examples of image appropriation, and I was unaware of the extent of the problem. For example, my photo of a wasp shown above, shot somewhat precariously on the ceiling of my living room while standing on a cardboard box (a diaper carton, fortunately we have past that stage, you can see this in the blog story about the photo, but I digress) placed on a chair, has been widely used without a license by many pest control companies.
The gentle image of waves on a shore shown below is used without license by several real estate companies located near one of the coasts.
Generally, image theft is as easy as right-clicking on the image, and choosing Save As from the context menu, then posting the photo without attribution. The fact that all my images are labeled as copyrighted, and that Flickr is set to “All Rights Reserved” seems to be widely ignored. I’m sure this is the situation for many photographers who post their work.
Waves on the Shore © Harold Davis
This information about the extensive use of my photos on the web came to my attention via a startup company named Pixsy that has some nifty technology to combat image theft, along with an innovative business model. Here’s how Pixsy works: First you register with Pixsy, and point their software at your online image stream, such as my website and Flickr. Pixsy then comes back with an automated image-matching search of the Internet, with matches showing suspected image theft. In my case, initially there were six-figures of matches (hence Phyllis and my internal designation of looking through these matches as “going down the rabbit hole”).
It’s up to the individual to go through the automated matches to determine which ones are legitimate, and which are image theft. For example, images I have actually licensed might show up on the Pixsy search, as well as all my book covers.
Road Trip © Harold Davis
When you find an example of image theft, you submit it to Pixsy. For example, my image of an empty road in Nevada shown above seems to turn up without license on a great many travel websites.
Pixsy lets you know whether they’ve accepted or rejected the submission. It’s company policy to only accept image submissions where there is a good likelihood of collecting a usage fee. Image submissions that are routinely rejected include: uses in countries that Pixsy doesn’t police (some countries are on a list for future handling, others are simply too lawless when it comes to copyright); non-commercial uses; the general catchall that Pixsy doesn’t think there is a “statistical likelihood of recovery”; and malefactors like Pinterest who hide behind the noxious common carrier provisions of the DMCA. Phyllis has most often been going down our rabbit hole, and trying to take some care with what she submits so that the usage is likely to meet Pixsy’s requirements; our acceptance rate is running somewhere between 30% and 50%.
Wet Poppy Bud © Harold Davis
Even if Pixsy doesn’t accept the submission, now that we know this usage is out there we can of course send a take-down notice on our own. Depending on the user, this may or may not work—my image of wet poppy bud shown above seems to turn up (among other places) on X-rated sites, many of which seem not to be particularly cooperative.
With an accepted submission, Pixsy determines a rate for the usage and begins negotiation with the image thief (who may have made a mistake in ignorance rather than with bad intentions). The starting point for the license fee is an industry-standard database of usage fees. By signing up with Pixsy, the user commits not to contact the infringer directly, except to confirm that Pixsy is the authorized representative.
Pixsy’s business model is to take 50% of any fees collected. This is inline, or a little more favorable, compared with the percentage taken by a conventional stock licensing agency.
Pixsy has submitted numerous invoices on my behalf, a few of which have been paid. It is a little too soon for me to get a definite sense of the overall financial success of their approach, but I am highly optimistic.
Most of all, these commercial and professional users should have known better than to steal my images without contacting me, or paying for the usages. My hope is that when it is widely known that “crime doesn’t pay”—because Pixsy will come after them—these image users will decide to do the right thing, and pay for their usage upfront. This could reverse some unpleasant trends in the photography business—the general lowering of licensing fees because of widely available online content perceived as free, just as in the music business.
I’d like to see leverage restored to image creators whose work is in demand, and from this viewpoint Pixsy’s technology and business model is a very positive development.
Actually, I don’t really care how Pinterest plans to make money, although in the light of the rest of this story it is worth noting that Pinterest has a private market value believed to be north of $10 Billion. Yes, that is Billion, as in a ten with nine zeros after it.
In case you’ve been doing your best to ignore social media on the Internet, the idea behind Pinterest is that users create virtual bulletin boards, and then “pin” images that are copied from a variety of sources onto these boards. I haven’t heard any cogent analysis of how this will make money, but I do know that plenty of my images are used this way without my permission…including one photo of a rose that is commonly mistaken for a Georgia O’Keeffe painting
A rose is a rose is a rose, except when it is not. A Harold Davis rose photo is apparently a Georgia O’Keeffe rose painting when you search Google Images for “Georgia O’Keeffe” (opens in a separate window, may be a number of rows down) except when it is actually Kiss from a Rose by Harold Davis (shown below). I’m really pretty flattered by the association, as Georgia O’Keeffe is certainly one of my great artistic heroes.
Kiss from a Rose © Harold Davis
I was alerted to my photo made in homage to O’Keeffe being mistaken for a literal O’Keeffe by a reader who wrote, “Hi Harold! Love your Rose Photography. I see on Google your work is confused with Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings!” While this case of mistaken artistic identity mostly involves Kiss from a Rose, some of my other images such as Eye of the Rose and even the book cover for my Photographing Flowers also occasionally show up categorized as O’Keeffe’s.
The conflation of Harold Davis photos with Georgia O’Keeffe paintings get even more pronounced on Pinterest, where a number of “boards” have “pinned” my image as a Georgia O’Keeffe’s. (See www.pinterest.com/terper1234/georgia-o-keeffe/ (my rose is called “a lush red O’Keeffe”), www.pinterest.com/nicolenotch/artist-o-keefe/ (once again my rose is ascribed to O’Keeffe) as examples, although this Pinterest Fakes and Mistakes board notes correctly that “NOT GEORGIA O’KEEFFE >>> this is a photo by Harold Davis”).
I am in fact of two minds about this issue. On the one hand, obviously it is good publicity for me that people like my work enough to pin it on their Pinterest boards. And, as I noted, I am certainly flattered to be compared with O’Keeffe.
On the other hand, it is hard enough to make money as a living artist these days when one is up against the common Internet dogma that information “wants to be free.” Ascribing to this theory across the board leads to a rush to the bottom. As a hint folks: ultimately this means no more quality visual art, literature, or music.
The TOS on Pinterest claims that each user (e.g., someone who creates a board) is responsible for obtaining permission to use work, but of course people just ignore this, and go ahead and scrape imagery off the sites where I post. I doubt anyone at Pinterest really believes that users are going to get permission, and posting this TOS is just el poo-poo del toro to try to ward off copyright lawsuits. Which someone should really do, and take Pinterest to the cleaners for the intellectual property scamsters they are. Or, Pinterest could prove they care about artistic creation by setting up a financial pool to reward artists whose work is used on their site.
What do you think about this? I know that many of my readers are Pinterest users. Am I out to lunch on this one?
