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April 30, 2012
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Alex Wild is an Illinois-based entomologist who studies the evolutionary history of ants. In 2003 he founded a photography business as an aesthetic complement to his scientific work, and his natural history photographs appear in numerous museums, books, and media outlets. Follow on Twitter @myrmecos.
Alex Wild is an Illinois-based entomologist who studies the evolutionary history of ants. In 2003 he founded a photography business as an aesthetic complement to his scientific work, and his natural history photographs appear in numerous museums, books, and media outlets. Follow on Twitter @myrmecos.
Yesterday’s L.A. Times ran a charming piece about ant sex by biologist Marlene Zuk:
What ant sex reminds us is that spring can be kind of scary, or at least sobering, particularly for non-humans. Millions of ants, millions of robin eggs, millions of flower seeds, most destined to die before they are even fully grown, and almost all unlikely to reproduce.
Zuk shares a poignant reflection on natural history, and nowadays such things are a rarity in our big news outlets. Read it.
But that’s not why I’m blogging. Accompanying the piece is a sketch penned by the very talented (and also very deceased) Dugald Stermer:
Giant Carpenter Ant, by Dugald Stermer
The ant looked familiar. It was traced, you see, from one of my original photographs:
Camponotus laevigatus, by Alex Wild
All things considered, I’d prefer to decorate my wall with Mr. Stermer’s version rather than my original field-guidey shot. It’s nice. The script adds a certain NeoVictorian flare.
However, I am not happy.
The sketch could never have existed without my original image nor without my taxonomic expertise in identifying the species. I received no acknowledgement for my part. Somebody else got paid for my efforts, and I got… an excuse to write a blog post, I suppose. What I mean is, I feel like a chump.
Artists and photographers are, deep down, 90% unoriginal. We borrow each others’ ideas. We forget where they came from. We copy, transpose, modify, build on, and find inspiration from diverse other people. Much of our unoriginality is acceptably divergent, and this is a good thing. Art could not exist at all were all forms of copying verboten.
Yet, some approximations are so close that what could be seen as flattery transposes into parasitism. Stermer’s ant is a direct trace of my work, and as such I find it crosses the ill-defined demarcation between the acceptably inspired and the infringing deviance. It’s a murky boundary, though, and one made all the more frustrating since artists and photographers are in the same economic boat. We should aspire to help each other out, rather than rip each other off.
I should note that this sort of copying happens to me all the time, and I’m never quite sure what to make of it. How much latitude should artists have when copying photographs?
What do you think?
***update
A number of people have questioned how I know it is my own photograph, and that I might just be hallucinating this in order to… what, I’m not sure.
First, and most obviously, I know my photographs. They are my little pixel children, seared into my memory. I recognize them when I see them.
But for you doubters out there, I’ve overlayed the contours of Stermer’s sketch on a 180º mirror of my original:
top: Stermer's sketch; middle: Stermer's sketch contour; bottom: the overlay
See it now?
About the Author: Alex Wild is an Illinois-based entomologist who studies the evolutionary history of ants. In 2003 he founded a photography business as an aesthetic complement to his scientific work, and his natural history photographs appear in numerous museums, books, and media outlets. Follow on Twitter @myrmecos.
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As an artist and past magazine illustrator and university design instructor, I completely agree with you. It’s getting out of hand. If I were given the assignment to do that illustration of a carpenter ant, I would have found your excellent reference photo — and then found three or four more to work from. From these, I’d develop an accurate composite sketch that would not in any way be identical to any of my reference. Or at least, that’s the way I was taught in college in the late 70′s…
BTW, professional artist organizations are now cracking down on the blatant copying of photos not taken by the artist, or that the artist does not have rights to or permission to use. I can think of an instance this past year, off the top of my head, where work has been disqualified for an award in an international exhibition due to misuse of a reference photo.
Link to thisI do agree acknowledgement would have the proper and respectable protocol, and I would hope for it, though I personally don’t require it. Color me stupid.
Link to thisThanks for your comments, hbird & IncredibleM.
I had a lovely phone conversation just now with the L.A. Times. It is not the paper’s fault, anyway- I pin this on the artist, who is deceased, so there is little point in pursuing this. I would have granted permission in any case, and it’s not like there were large sums of money involved.
Link to thisMr Wild — I’m sorry you weren’t credited; I was a magazine art director for years and proper crediting of photography & illustration was something I was personally concerned about. And I was also a great admirer of Dugald Stermer’s work. BTW, many years ago, an award-winning wildlife photographer wrote to complain to the editors of a national artists’ magazine when he recognized his uncredited photo of a cheetah, blatantly copied by an artist on the cover of an issue. (I can’t remember the medium used or any names involved, not that I’d repeat them here…) But I remember hearing what he wrote was hilarious, and something to the effect of, “I didn’t spend two days in the bush on my knees in cheetah piss, waiting to get that perfect shot, to have some artist not bother to ask my permission or give me credit, much less pay me!”
Link to thisHate to be a stickler, but semantics are important. “When an artist copies a photograph…” suggests that photography is not an art form and photographers are not artists. A photographic artist can copy other artists artwork as easily and unethically as any other medium. “Artist” is a blanket term (including photographers, illustrators, painters, sculptors, writers, etc…). The thrust of the article is; illustrators (and by extension painters) are making derivative artwork from an original photograph and not giving credit (or more importantly paying for the use). If you mean illustrator then say it, not “artist.”
Link to thisIn my own situation, my painting mentor/professor (hbird’s comments not withstanding) taught me to paint and draw from life, never from photographs. Want to make an illustration? Go out and observe the world and/or make your own photographs (while you’re at it, since you’re making a photograph why not cut out the middleman and simply make the photograph the final artwork instead of slaving it to another medium). Can’t get to your subject, don’t use another artist’s pluck for making the effort to do it for you. Or at least pay the artist whose work you’re using an agree upon fee.
Interesting and reminds me of the painter who won the Australian award for best landscape by copying a classic Dutch picture:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/double-dutch-scandal-rocks-wynne-painting-prize/story-e6frg6nf-1225853393138
As you can see from the article, the artist and judges were unrepentant. If I were an artist, this comment might cause me to spit the dummy:
“Others scoffed at that notion [i.e. that copying was bad], however, saying the age of appropriation was upon us and artists were referencing each other without any criticism at all.”
Link to thisThis sort of thing always worries me – during GCSE art we were encouraged to go through mags and copy the pictures and I made a really lovely drawing of lots of different images I had copied and done some of my own designs with. But then felt that I couldn’t sell the picture even to the school as it contained stuff I had copied – I hadn’t asked permission of the models nor the photographers.
Even my art teacher thought this abit odd.
But then I have another issue – what of statues and sculptures? If I take a photo of them? Should I be paying the sculpter some money? Etc… The archetect of a building? The car manufacturer?
This has personally stifled alot of my projects so when I produce something I prefer to say hey you can use this for your own stuff – try and remember who I am to credit.
But then I am not relying on my art income for food. I like the idea of creative networks – but alot of people are unaware of the issues of copying or are so afraid of them they will not dare ask for permission. The amount of times I’ve found friends using my photos as profile pics without saying anything!
So after all that waffle my conclusion is that I have no idea what would be the best thing to do. Creative ideas flow best when there is freedom but that leaves you vunerable to people who really are taking the pee – but more than that as you’ve said you may not remember where the idea came from, the artist may fill it is completely their own creation etc…
Link to thisI think you’re very short-sighted if you think you’re the only person who has taken a photo of a carpenter ant that looks in every way exactly like that one. Prejudiced of me as it may sound, all carpenter ants look alike. There must be thousands of photos catching an ant in just that pose, so why are you so convinced the artist traced your photo?
Link to thisKcconkey-
You know what looks even more alike than all Carpenter ants?
All people.
There are some 1,000 species in the genus Camponotus, and they span a considerably greater range of sizes, shapes, colors and proportions than does our own species. Which is to say, your suspicion that you are being anthropocentrically prejudiced here is correct. In theory, there are a great many more ways to photograph a carpenter ant than there are ways to photograph a human, believe it or not. We just don’t pay them so much attention.
Link to thisIt’s sickening to see this. Especially this steal a photo trace it thing. As an illustrator I pride myself in being able to draw from mind, with style. Kids think copying a photo is art. I guess its why all those photo copies get them no where. They never make any money. They spend hours and days trying to replicate a photo. No creativeness at all. No skill other than hand eye. The person who copies photos gains nothing. Their work never gets noticed, they never make money for their art, and more than 90 percent of them trace. Dig deeper in art history and you find the old masters used grids, and view finders. But a great talent like Michelangelo and Da Vinci drew from mind. They were creatives and visionaries. Alphonse Mucca is another. These guys didn’t have photos to work from. Their work had life. When you copy a photo and you do it successfully your work cannot be told apart from it. Which makes the entire process pointless. Being an artist is about being a creative. There’s no creative about copying a photo. And today all these people are tracing. So it makes it even more pointless. For some reason people who aren’t artists find it amazing that someone can draw a photo. They don’t realize how silly it is. It’s sad that they even think its interesting. We need to make the shift. Art is about being creative.
Link to this