Who Owns an Image?

Evelyn Kreutzer presents:
«A History of the World According to Getty Images» by Richard Misek

Julian Ross presents:
«Mariam Jafri Vs. Maryam Jafri» by Maryam Jafri

Volker Pantenburg presents (10 minutes of):
«The Cinema and the Wind and Photography» by Hartmut Bitomsky

The three video essays presented in this section all deal with questions of ownership and authorship, as well as archival and/or material reproduction. In the 55-minute TV programme “Das Kino und der Wind und die Photographie” (1991), Harmut Bitomsky presents his film-analytical thoughts about various historical films by showing excerpts from them on monitors, TV sets and VCR-players while delivering his thoughts in front of or next to them. This was a way to circumvent copyright issues but certainly also presents a meta-performative element that plays with the voice and persona of the film critic and public intellectual – an element that Volker Pantenburg picks up in his presentation of the material here as well. Richard Misek’s A History Of The World According To Getty Images (2023), which was published in the academic online journal [in]transition, also embarks on an archival project. Tackling Getty Images' questionable commercialization of iconic historical footage and images, Misek uncovers that Getty Images keeps numerous important historical image documents under wraps and sells their reproduction rights for profit, despite the fact that many of them are already technically in the public domain/out of copyright. Maryam Jafri’s video Mariam Jafri Vs. Maryam Jafri (2019) deals with the material traces and image reproduction of her own art. Focusing on her readymade sculpture Anxiety (2017), which includes the replica that she bought in a sex shop of a woman’s feet, and a Getty press photograph taken of the sculpture, she reflects on the meaning of author- and ownership when objects and images get recycled in different media and go through different hands. All videos speak to a classic postmodern deconstruction of the distinction between original and copy and of the capitalistic exploitations of images and human representation – challenges that are extra pertinent right now in light of new developments in AI-generated images. The three videos call into question the ethics of audio-visual appropriation and recycling (see Baron 2020), and point at the ways in which audio-visual videography might counter an old conundrum inherent in the concept of the archive itself. The archive preserves objects and images and yet by doing so keeps them out of circulation (Derrida 1996). At some point in his film, Bitomsky reflects on people’s «Recht am eigenen Bild» (“right to their own image”). In her piece, Jafri declares that «we have no right to our own image», and Misek positions his video as an attempt to «release the images from captivity». One might then ask: which images do the three videos reproduce themselves and which power dynamics and reflections might enable or limit them to do so?  

References:
Jaime Baron: Reuse, Misuse, Abuse: The Ethics of Audiovisual Appropriation in the Digital Era, Rutgers University Press, 2020
Jacques Derrida: Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, University of Chicago Press, 1996

Book:
Sylvie Lindeperg, Ania Szczepanska: Who Owns the Images?, meson press, 2021