Here's Your Illustration!

Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, B655-23B

A. Aubrey Bodine working under his enlarger 

This was supposed to be the illustration for the enlarger article. 

This happens more often than you'd think. I don't write articles in advance, and I generally search for illustration images while I'm writing. This was fine in the freewheeling early years of blogs, when everything on the Web was, by convention, free for the taking. Now, because still images have been used for a longer time (early broadband couldn't support video streaming—you can thank the porn and gaming industries for your YouTube and Vimeo and your other video content, by the way) and are more easily searchable, there are more "chilling effect" restrictions in place for still images than for video and musical streaming content. Which seems unfair, but oh well.

Anyway, I now have to secure the rights for most images I present. Usually that just means getting permission. Most rights holders freely give permission, as the Maryland Historical Society has done for me here (and thanks to them for that!), but it doesn't suit my way of working very well—instead of finding an image to post and including it inline with the post, I sometimes have to wait days or weeks for permission. Effectively that means I either have to publish the post without the image I wanted for it, or I have to set the post aside and wait for the image and then publish the whole shebang after a delay. You'd think this would be easy, but often one post leads to another and there's a sort of flow to what goes up when—or I hope there is, anyway—and anyway I'm not very organized, so I personally don't work well that way. For this post, for instance, I had to correspond with the four photographers, and it took about a month before I heard from them all.

At any rate, here is the illustration that I wanted to use for that enlarger post. Published by kind permission of the owner of the JPEG image; the print, I'm sure, is in the public domain by now. A. Aubrey Bodine was a Baltimore (Maryland) photographer who was sort of an amalgam of commercial photographer, journalist, documentarian, tech geek and photohobbyist, and Pictorialist, all rather uneasily (by modern standards) wrapped up into one. He was later championed by Kathleen Ewing, a longtime Washington D.C. gallerist (and acquaintance, and sometime mentor) who was one of the founders of AIPAD. He was popular; here's Kathleen's book about him. He published many books, some of which were award-winners in their time. Many of his photographs are quite beautiful, in a lyrical, lovely, camera-clubby, conventional-composition sort of way. (No slur intended.) This picture is a self portrait, I believe. My guess is he's holding the shutter bulb in his right hand. And the image on the easel is faked—he was a great multi-negative printer, quite a master of darkroom techniques.

Apropos my point: at the "Kathleen Ewing" link above, note the "Buy Photo" hotlink below the illustration photo of her. And the link is dead! It would probably take a lot of work and possibly some expense for me to publish that picture of Kathleen here in this post.

"And so it goes." (Credit Linda Ellerbee and Kurt Vonnegut for the phrase.)

Mike
(Thanks to Dan Goodrich and the Maryland Historical Society)

Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Speed Graphic: "Anyone who wears a bow tie and cufflinks is probably a pretty interesting fellow."

Michael Perini: "That’s a Saltzman 8x10 enlarger. Saltzman made the most robust studio camera and lighting gear ever. With the possible exception of the Deardorff 12' bi-post camera stand for their 11x14 commercial view camera (60" of bellows)."

Comments

[Joe]

"Published by kind permission of the owner of the JPEG image; the print, I'm sure, is in the public domain by now."

Wait, there are separate copyrights for digital images and prints?

[Andrew]

It's not always perfect, but the Wikimedia Commons is an exceptional resource for editorial images like this. Most of the images have a standard Creative Commons license agreement, where you are free to publish it (with proper attribution, which is not particularly onerous).

A quick search for "darkroom enlarger" yielded this image:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:EnlargingANegativeC1950.jpg

It may not have all the drama of the (really quite beautiful) image you have used today for the post, but it at least gets at the nugget of it for non-critical illustrations.

[Michael]

Thanks for including the Kathleen Ewing article link. That was like stepping through a time warp, back to the era of Miles Davis sans mute. Good times, mumbled the old geezer.

[AN]

If a photograph is in the public domain, one can't simply make a copy of it (JPEG or otherwise) and claim a new copyright.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel_Corp.

[Yeah but I don't actually know if it's in the public domain. How would I, unless it were so labeled? So it's still kind of a risk. "I thought it was okay" isn't a very good defense in a lawsuit, I'm guessing. (IANAL.) --Mike]

[John Camp]

You're not alone in your need for quick usage rights; the whole Internet moves at that speed. I would think there must be (or could be created) some kind of "single-use-for-free" permission that could be attached to on-line photos that would allow a single use by anyone, as long as credit is given. Arranging either formal permission (or payment) is something that would simply kill most uses by Internet blogs. I would think the owners of the photos would WANT them to be used, even if used free, in the hope that a single use might lead to further paid uses. They should, or could, think of it as free advertising.

[Gordon Lewis]

>>the image on the easel is faked

I spotted that right away. As clever as he may have been, he forgot or intentionally disregarded the fact that an enlarger projects a negative image. This photo makes it look like he simply placed a normal print in the easel.

[hugh crawford]

Ohh 8x10 Saltzman.
I had an opportunity to buy one complete with a Navy shipping case for $30 but had to pass because it wouldn't fit in the van we were using. It's always been my dream enlarger. The $8 M3 with summicron was easier to carry.
If I were building up a new darkroom...

[Omer]

A bowtie and cufflinks! A marketing/advertising picture is my guess.

[Eamon Hickey]

Any man who works in the darkroom wearing a bow tie and links in his French cuffs is a far better man than I. Wonderful!

[robert e]

"My guess is he's holding the shutter bulb in his right hand. And the image on the easel is faked—he was a great multi-negative printer, quite a master of darkroom techniques."

Simpler to just place a finished print in the easel, no? The cone of light from the enlarger is more intriguing, IMO. I suspect that was added "in post".

[c.d.embrey]

For the most part Americans are uptight. In public they are hung up on inconsequential morality. In private they consume sin. Without a puerile interest in porn there would be no VCR, no internet as we now know it today.

In 1896, a film called Le Coucher de la Mariée showed a woman performing a striptease thus becoming the first ponographic film. The invention of the VCR, liberated porno movies from stag parties, making it easy to view salacious movies at home.

The WSJ said that Dannie's Hard Drive invented e-commerce (1997)—with the on-line selling of nude photos. On-line sales drove the demand for bandwidth, and created web-based payment services (PayPal, etc). Like it or not, porn equals progress.

[James Bullard]

Had the image on the easel been real, it would be negative.

[Chris Rusbridge]

AFAIK flickr (and presumably other image resources) will let you search for images covered by Creative Commons licences. Mind you, they don't make it easy to add them; even when I have CC-BY in my Copyright field, flickr still defaults to "All Rights Reserved", and I usually forget to change it, sadly.

[AN]

Regarding John Camp’s comment: Creative Commons licenses were (in part) an effort to solve this problem. Almost 20 years later, results are mixed, but they can be useful, if you want to encourage the free use of your images within some defined limitations.

I would think the owners of the photos would WANT them to be used, even if used free, in the hope that a single use might lead to further paid uses. They should, or could, think of it as free advertising.

That’s a dicey assertion, especially the bit about free advertising leading to paid uses. Sure, that works if you are an artist ultimately aiming to sell prints, but creative individuals aiming to license their content for commercial use (or work for hire) can get pretty upset about how many people want to offer nothing but free advertising in exchange for their work. Frequently, free advertising leads to nothing but more free advertising.

Cultural heritage organizations (like the Maryland Historical Society) are an interesting case, because they often have a public service-oriented mission, and so may be eager to share, but sometimes they still get weird about these things, because they are protective of their holdings, or desperate for cash, or even nervous about their own legal liability to other rights holders.

[JH]

Have you been harassed by Higbee & Associates, the trolls who file thousands of copyright claims on image uses? We were harassed by them for a year before they understood that we were a nonprofit educational society and our use was considered fair use under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. They ain't very smart. One aide claimed we could not be a non-profit because we took credit cards!

DMCA: https://www.copyright.gov/reports/studies/dmca/dmca_executive.html

However these trolls have changed the way we write our newsletter. We no longer post images from the web without permission even when we don't need it; we simply summarize an article and post a link. And we removed hundreds of images from the last 25 years of our online newsletter that we could not verify permission.

Your comments allow users to post photos, so I suggest you register as a "Safe harbor." See https://buchwaldlaw.com/2017/08/dmca-copyright-safe-harbor-explained-website-needs-dmcacopyright-policy/

[Bob Sacamano]

The image is probably not in the public domain, because copyrights tend to expire 50 to 70 years after the 1st of January that follows the death of the maker. And if this is a self-portrai, that clock did not start ticking until 1971 (Bodine died in 1970).
More importantly, giving permission for publication is NOT the right of someone who published the JPEG if they are not the holders of the publication rights for the work.

Sorry to tell you this, but it is far from certain that you are legally off the hook. Let alone that the nature of copyright also entails that the jpeg and the print have no separate "owners" (you probably meant "rights holders") as we must assume that the jpeg does not constitute a separate work. Instead it is "just" another reproduction of the work, in which no separate rights are vested.