Friday, June 10, 2011

Wk2-RE: Alli's Post


Alli Said:

Week 2-Free Choice-Important Media History: Obama Hope Poster For Sale
I am very familiar with this poster as I’m sure everyone is. I don’t think was Shepard Fairey did anything wrong at all. Painters do it all the time. They take an image as reference or inspiration and create a painting. I think he used an image and created something graphically different and beautiful. It’s his original work, his paint, his idea his color choices etc. I used to get projects like this all the time in illustration classes. We were to find an image and recreate it graphically using Illustrator and Photoshop or whatever we preferred. Could he have asked for permission…yes. Would he saved himself a lot of trouble…yes. Now my question is if this poster didn’t become as huge and public as it did would there be any issue? I feel a lot of times no one has a problem with anything until someone else gets noticed.
Alli,

I Said:
(I know I know, I am waffling on issues)

I spoke of the copyright infringement of the  musicians in “good Copy Bad Copy” because they used parts of the original artist’s piece in a new composition…..so why do I disagree in this case: (drum roll, please)

I think there is a difference in the two issue, minor, but present. The music has a present actually existing element from the original recording. In the poster the Pose, the look, the feel of the moment in time was there, but unless there were actual pieces of the original photo there, there are no parts to the original image.

Only a Graphic Designer knows the work involved in recreating and image graphically and though I think the similarities are enough to cause the hoopla, the image is no longer a photograph anymore, or even created with the same media.

Yes he could have asked for permission and saved a lot of trouble and I do feel like the fame and notoriety of the poster made the inspiration source an issue.

I think that the difference in my views between the sampling of music vs. the graphic poster recreation is the fact there is still a actual tangible element of the original in it’s original format on the music whereas the only part of the photo present in Fairley’s piece is the pose…

To quote, my instructor: “Ah, yeah, it's complicated.”*  

* Blog Post: on June 8, 2011 9:10 PM
http://aliweinreb.blogspot.com/2011/06/week-2-free-choice-important-media.html#comments

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