A History of the World According to Getty Images | Richard Misek

Evelyn Kreutzer:

Richard Misek’s A History of the World According to Getty Images (2023), published in the academic online journal [in]transition, takes on Getty Images themselves. As Misek declares in his written statement about the video, Getty Images is the largest commercial image library in the world, which houses «[m]any of the defining images of the last century» (such as the crash of the Hindenburg or the Apollo moon landings). Yet, despite the fact that these images are old enough to be out of copyright and therefore technically in the "public domain", Getty keeps a monopoly on them and makes profit by selling their reproduction rights. What does this mean to our idea of history? Of who gets to tell, show, reproduce history? Of who owns an image and, by extension, of who owns history? Misek raises these vital questions and embeds them in a meta-reflection on power. The power of the image, he declares, is directly linked to the power dynamics in our societies and histories («The past offers no surprises… as it is the source of all the inequalities and injustices that still exist»). He counters Getty Images’ power over our shared images by buying the rights (“paying the ransom”) to several historical films in Getty’s library, such as iconic footage of the Hindenburg crash and an early actuality film of downtown San Francisco, shot by the Miles brothers, and including them in his film – uncut, unedited, unaltered. This is, as he says, to «release the images from captivity» and make them freely available for reproduction by others – this time in the proper spirit of the public domain. One might call this a “power move” on Misek’s end as well, given the budget necessary for doing so and the institutional and legal backing necessary for him to be able to go through with his film. The goal and effect of this decision is to give the power back to all of us – the collective public domain, to have access to our shared history of images. It is both a symbolically rich and a practical, consequential gesture towards what a protest culture could look like with regards to image ownership.

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A History of the World According to Getty Images | Video Essay | Richard Misek | 2023 | 18’ | [in]transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies, 10.2, 2023

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