Interacting with photographers and photography forums, I see a lot of passionate discussion about how images should be used and shared on the internet. Photographers are, understandably, concerned about intellectual property rights, copyrights, and their ability to continue to make a living from making images.
Penguin by zoutedrop
These are similar to the issues that the music industry has been confronting for over a decade now. The industry itself has been slow to respond, and, I think, pretty uncreative in its responses. However, a smattering of individual artists have developed really innovative solutions to the problem of how to make a living while also letting go of their work enough to let it spread. It’s only by letting go that huge audiences can experience their work, which ultimately builds their market.
In March the NPR show On The Media did a fantastic program on this topic within the music industry. They featured one artist in particular, Amanda Palmer, who has excelled at innovating around her marketability and with her fans. “Everyone has to stop thinking there is an answer,” she tells producer Rick Karr. “The answer is, there’s an infinite number of answers.”
Her solutions have included t-shirt projects (one of which raised $19,000 in 10 hours through twitter, according to OTM), flash-mob concerts that utilize public spaces and ask for contributions from fans in person, and by maintaining a blog and a twitter account that allow fans to engage with her in her innovation process, as well as understand more about the real life of a musician (i.e. why artists need fans’ money in the first place).
Green Wood by Juan Antonio Capo
It seems to me there are two main elements to this innovation process. 1) Eschewing what people won’t pay for, and figuring out what people WILL pay for. In the music industry, people don’t really want to buy cd’s any more, but they do want to buy tshirts. They want merch. Bands have become brands. 2) Merging with patterns, and leveraging social media. People are spending their time and money on interacting digitally—so Nine Inch Nails, famously radical in the way they interact with their fan base, (making online treasure hunts for example) has developed an iPhone app. Radiohead was one of the first bands to shift the responsibility, and the power, overtly to the fans by releasing their album online for free, and asking people to make a donation in an amount of their choice. People want to support the stuff (music, pictures, objects) they love, so if you stop manipulating them and acknowledge the power they have as fans, you can catalyze voluntary, genuine, at-scale support.
Square Nature, by m4tik
I think it’s time for photographers to start innovating in similar ways. Journalism itself is iterating, testing out new models like ProPublica, citizen journalism, and new digital formats. So what are photographers doing? (Please send me examples of innovators in this arena!)
One evening last spring, I had a friend who specializes in word-of-mouth-marketing tell me, “Eliza, I want to challenge you to make your images shareable on the web.” I had been asking him for advice, but I had not expected him to say this. At first I thought NO WAY.
Introspective Goat by tjdewey
But after a year of blogging, browsing, tweeting and generally engaging with photography on the web in a new way, I think he is absolutely right. One of the best things photographers can do for themselves is to build an audience, and you can’t build a large audience right now without using the internet. I don’t lose anything from a) putting my images online, and b) putting them under a Creative Commons license. Even without that symbol, anyone can repost my images anyway, citing the fair use policy (which I agree with—we need cultural commentators just like we need artists).
It’s not as if I can make money from those images when they are 72 dpi anyway. Perhaps in a print format—either as fine art prints, or as printable files for editorial content—but my images on the web are not at a size where someone can print them nicely (or, not the way I print them, anyway!). And helping my images get spread around the web basically acts as free advertising on my behalf. It only helps me. By putting them under Creative Commons, I become an active participant in cultural change, rather than impotently fighting the inevitable. I become someone who is using the strengths of the internet to my own advantage. In a way, I regain control by giving up control. And I acknowledge the immense creative power that lies in building upon the work of others, which we do all the time.
Balconies by o palsson
A Developing Story has just launched a campaign that builds upon this same idea. They are asking why awareness campaigns, designed to save lives through health education, can’t be put under a creative commons license so that humanitarians, doctors, social workers and volunteers can have materials constantly available to them in the work that they do. It’s an interesting question.
All images in this post are licensed as Creative Commons on Flickr.
Tags: amanda palmer, CC, copyright, Creative Commons, flickr, intellectual property, music industry, shareable, social media, the internet, twitter