Microstock Calendar

POYi is announcing an annual $10,000 "Emerging Vision Incentive" to support a year-long project of an aspiring photojournalist, says POYi director Rick Shaw.

"It's not a grant," he insists, although it looks and sounds just like one.

The first $10,000 award will be handed out in June. "It's not a huge amountt of money, but we're hoping it's enough to take a topic of global significance and see it through to completion," Shaw says.

The 'incentive' is funded by the Annenberg Foundation and the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation. It will be administered by POYi as a separate program from the Picture of the Year competition.

"The inspiration is to do the right thing in our economic climate with aspiring photographers," Shaw says. "We want to give something back."

The grant is open to students and emerging or early career photographers. There's no age restriction, but the rules bar applicants whose primary income is from working as a photographer (in other words, established pros need not apply.)

"So if someone is a security guard, and their whole hope was to become a documentary photographer, but they're not able to get a foothold because of the current publishing climate and economic realities, this [incentive] would do it," Shaw says.

Deadline for applications will be in May. Applicants will be required to submit a two- or three-page proposal, along with several initial project images. "It would be like a story pitch," Shaw says. In addition, applicants will be required to submit a general portfolio of up to 12 single images. There will be a $20 application fee.

One winner will be selected, and his or her completed project will be exhibited at the Annenberg space for Photography in Los Angeles next year.

Full details will be available on POYi's web site later today [April 28], Shaw says.

Want to know how Rineke Dijkstra makes penne rigate alla pizzaiola? Want to cook up Simon Roberts's recipe for lamb shank tagine with quince? Or Martin Parr's recipe for that classic English dish, beans on toast?

About eight students in the graduating class of the University of Falmouth BA Photo program have been hard at work to produce a 100-page cookbook that they are selling to raise money for their thesis exhibition. All the recipes in Say Cheese? were contributed by well known photographers, including Alec Soth, Richard Misrach, Tierney Gieron, the aforementioned amateur cooks and several others. The cookbook is illustrated with photos contributed by the program's students. 

It's hard to explain a mind-blowing mess like this one, but AFP is suing a Haitian photojournalist for "antagonistic assertion of [his] rights" after it distributed his news-breaking earthquake photos all over the world without his permission. AFP is mad because the photographer, Daniel Morel, sent cease and desist letters to numerous AFP clients, allegedly made false and defamatory statements about AFP, and made unreasonable monetary demands of AFP for infringement.

AFP is asking a federal court in Manhattan to declare that it did nothing wrong, and force Morel to pay unspecified damages for defamation.

Morel, a veteran photojournalist and former AP photographer, was in Port au Prince when the earthquake struck. He shot news images moments after the quake, and within an hour, the daughter of a friend helped him post 13 high resolution images on Twitter from a hotel that still had a working internet connection.

AFP downloaded the images and distributed them through Getty, it's distribution partner. Morel's iconic image of an earthquake victim (shown above) appeared on the front pages of newspapers all over the world the next day. In many cases, the images carried the credit of AFP, Getty, and a Dominican photographer who stole Morel's images and re-tweeted them as his own. (Morel says AFP knew who the images actually belonged to, a claim AFP does not seem to be disputing).

Morel started sending the cease and desist letters to AFP and various users of Morel's images. AFP says it immediately stopped distributing his images. But the damage was done, and Morel has been seeking an unspecified payment from AFP.

AFP finally sued, asserting that the Twitter Terms of Service are perfectly clear: Anything uploaded to Twitter is free for re-distribution. Besides, AFP says, Morel didn't indicate that he was putting any restrictions on the use of the images that he tweeted.

Morel's response in court papers to that he "had no prior experience with Twitter...and did not read the Terms of Service." He also explains that he posted the images on Twitter with hopes that they "would span the globe to inform the world of the disaster, and that he would also receive compensation and credit as a professional photographer for breaking news of the earthquake before the news and wires services."

In a perfect world, photographers could take their stories to the world without major distributors and other middlemen, and somehow get paid--even after the fact--for pictures they have posted for all the world to see. 

In fact, The Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press, and others did see Morel's tweet and offer him money to publish and distribute his images, according to papers he filed in court. Not everyone, in other words, assumed that Morel's images were free for the taking because of Twitter's Terms of Service.

But a perfect world it isn't. The internet may be empowering, but this case shows how vulnerable photographers' copyrights are--and not just to petty thieves, but to big corporations who have the money and lawyers to beat small copyright owners up in court on the grounds that some fine print makes it legal to copy and distribute their works without permission.

That, of course, raises the question: what is copyright really worth anymore if technology has turned it into something that benefits only those with the resources to enforce and defend it at every turn?

The Impossible Project, which in March announced the success of their effort re-engineer analog instant film packs for Polaroid cameras, will open a New York store and gallery on April 30.

Their PX 100 and PX 600 black and white instant film packs, manufactured for use in vintage Polaroid SX-70 and 600 cameras respectively, will be on-sale at the store, as will stock of stock of existing Polaroid films and cameras.

The Impossible Project film packs hold 8 instant pictures and retail for $21.

In addition to selling film and cameras, the Impossible Project Store will also display instant photographs and enlargements produced recently by a selection of artists from the United States and Europe, which are the foundation of a new instant film art collection, dubbed “The Impossible Collection,” which is modeled after The Polaroid Collections once owned by Polaroid.

The Impossible Project Space will host a grand opening party from 3pm-8pm on April 30.

Other Impossible Project stores are also open in Vienna and Berlin.

More information:
The Impossible Project Space
425 Broadway, 5th Floor
New York, NY 10013
www.the-impossible-project.com

Related:
New Instant Film for Polaroid Cameras Unveiled, March 2010
Jake Chessum Tests New Instant Film for Polaroid Cameras, March 2010
The Crusade to Reinvent Polaroid, February 2009

Getty has announced that it will soon acquire Rex Features, a London-based competitor in the celebrity and entertainment image business.

"Growing our entertainment imagery business continues to be a key strategic focus," Getty CEO Jonathan Klein said in press release announcing the deal.

Terms were not disclosed.

Getty says it will maintain the Rex Features brand, and provide greater distribution for the Rex Features collection through Getty's distribution channels. Beyond that, representatives of Getty and Rex declined to say how the deal might affect Rex's contributing photographers in the short or long term. They also declined to say how many photographers Rex Features represents.

Rex Features was founded more than 50 years ago. Rex Features merged in 2008 with Berliner, another storied celebrity photo agency that had struggled to keep up with the digital age. At the time of that merger, Rex and Berliner said they expected to add 2,500 images daily to an archive of more than 22 million images.

Former LIFE photographer Myron Davis, whose iconic images included the
"From Here to Eternity" photo of actors Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr kissing on a beach, died on April 17 from injuries suffered in a fire that broke out in his apartment in Hyde Park, Chicago. Davis was 90 years old.

According to the obituary that ran in the Chicago Sun-Times on April 21, thousands of Davis's career-making images were found in files at his home and miraculously went undamaged by the fire, which authorities determined was accidental in nature.

Davis grew up on the South side of Chicago and later attended the University of Chicago. He joined LIFE in 1941 and had also worked for Advertising Age, the Chicago Sun-Times, Collier's Weekly, Ladies' Home Journal and the  
Saturday Evening Post. He was also a famed war photographer and, as Chicago-based photographer Art Shay told the Sun-Times, was known for “living off the land and living under combat conditions. He really had to get close and that's what combat photography is all about."

Davis's archive contains thousands of subjects, including a photo essay on an Iowa farm boy and his dog, the last photos of film comedienne Carole Lombard at an Indiana war bond rally (her plane crashed on the way back to California), as well as portraits of General Dwight Eisenhower, President Franklin Roosevelt, and famed photojournalist Robert Capa reading in a bathtub, among many, many others. 

The photographer is survived by a daughter, two sons, six grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

Photo © Myron Davis

The Cannes iStockalypse continues over the weekend.  Here’s some photos of the action.

The morning workshops provided educational content on lighting and retouching techniques.

The three daily shoots continue with varied themes from studio portraits, beach scenes out on La Croisette, office shoots taking advantage of the Palais des Festivals and a Marie Antoinette shoot at the Mediatheque (library).

iStockalypse shoots are no longer ‘gang shoots’ with multiple photographers shooting at once, but the size of this event makes it a necessity.

Have you seen Microstock Charts yet?

Current TV, which is owned by Al Gore, has won its appeal against photographer Ken Light in a dispute over an unauthorized use of a news photograph. The ruling cleared Current TV of wrongdoing, and vacated a $500 judgment that Light won last February in small claims court.

Light sued after Current TV published one of his images on its Web site without permission. Light had licensed the image of a Texas death row inmate to The New Yorker, which published the photo on its Web site. Current TV then appropriated the image and published it on its own Web site last year without permission.

Light charged Current TV with unfair competition under state law, which enabled him to prosecute Current TV in a state small claims court. He explained at the time that taking the case to a state court was much easier and less costly than filing a copyright infringement claim in federal court.

But Current TV appealed the small claims ruling. After a two-hour hearing on April 14, a Superior Court judge ruled in Current TV's favor. He gave no explanation for the decision.

Light says that Current TV called their chief technologist as a witness to explain that Current TV didn't copy the picture; instead they created an in-line link to the image displayed on the New Yorker's Web site.

"They were saying that since The New Yorker doesn't block [in-line linking], they didn't see a problem with going in and taking it [that way]," Light says. "They also said it was fair use, and that it was a copyright case, so it didn't belong in state court. They muddied the discussion with all these other issues."

Light says he doesn't think that he would be allowed to appeal the case again in state court. If he wants to press it, he would have to file a copyright claim in federal court. "I don't know if I'm going to [do that]," he says.

Meanwhile, Light is taking satisfaction in the favorable publicity he's gotten from the case. "It's nice having a piece in the New York Times to mop up your tears with," he says.

He adds, "Yes, I lost, but I think waving the flag is important. As the Times pointed out, Al Gore knows about [the case]. My students and associates have e-mailed Tipper [Gore's wife], so she knows about it." (Tipper Gore was a photojournalist before her husband entered politics.)

The publicity surrounding Light's case may also encourage other photographers to get involved in the fight for photographers' rights, Light says. "We have to keep [pushing] this until we get some protection," he says.

Related posts:
Photographer Busts Al Gore's TV Company for Photo Rip-Off
Al Gore TV Challenges An Inconvenient Photographer

Here's a lively discussion from the NAB show floor last week between video luminary Philip Bloom and HD-DSLR shooter Khalid Mohtaseb on the controversy over "cinematic journalism." If you haven't heard the term cinematic journalism yet, you'll likely be hearing a lot more about it this year with the continued mainstreaming of digital SLRs that can shoot gorgeous high-def video.

Though Bloom's voice is completely shot (someone pass him a lozenge!) and it's hard to hear Mohtaseb over the trade show chatter, their 6+ minute chat is illuminating mostly for the fact it's even taking place at all.

Less than two years after the first HD-DSLRs made the scene, we're already discussing whether appealing visual aesthetics and gritty video journalism can co-exist. To all of which, we say: bring it on!

Below is the video of the discussion and below that is a video Mohtaseb shot of the disaster in Haiti which sparked the controversy. (Via DSLR News Shooter.)

Khalid Mohtaseb and Philip Bloom discuss Cinematic journalism and DSLR video from Dan Chung on Vimeo.

Haiti Earthquake Aftermath Montage from Khalid Mohtaseb on Vimeo.