We’ve seen plenty of examples of photographers suing brands or publications for using their work without permission, but this might be the first time we’ve seen a photographer complain that their work been quite literally set in stone. 

In a lawsuit, Allen Kee claims a statue unveiled last year of footballer Barry Sanders is based on his own 1995 photo of a game. In a behind-the-scenes video from the Detroit Lions depicting the creation of the statue, the photo can be seen in the background, presumably acting as a reference. (For more NFL controversies, check out the Super Bowl logo conspiracy theory that’s sweeping the web.)

According to Michigan Live, Kee is suing the Detroit Lions, as well as Getty Images, NFL Properties, NFL Enterprises, Fanatics, Dick’s Sporting Goods, McFarlane Toys and others in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, for “direct, contributory and or vicarious copyright infringement”. The suit claims that he “was working as a freelance photographer when the photo was taken, was not an employee of any entity or organisation at the time he created the photograph and did not create the photo under any “work for hire” arrangement or contract.”

In a short statement to Michigan Live, Detroit Lions responded to the accusation. “We are aware of the suit,” the statement reads, “and are prepared to vigorously defend our position that these claims lack merit.”

We’re certainly curious to see how this one plays out – while copyright disputes involving the use of photos tend to be somewhat clear-cut, whether the statue will prove to constitute unlawful use of an alleged reference photo remains to be seen. For something altogether more ridiculous, take a look at the logo dispute between Rockstar and Remedy Games that’s currently bemusing the gaming community.

A giant coffee bean in the middle of a forest, a woman with flowers for eyes camouflaged against a patterned backdrop, and a group of women pulling leafy vines, symbolizing a tug of war with nature, are featured among the images in Lavazza’s 2024 calendar.

Every year since 1993, the Italian coffee manufacturer has produced a photography calendar, featuring images from the likes of Helmut Newton, David La Chapelle and Annie Leibovitz. This year’s edition celebrates the African continent as the birthplace of coffee (widely considered to be Ethiopia).

Featuring the work of three African photographers, Thandiwe Muriu, Aart Verrips and Daniel Obasi, and themed “More than Us,” the 2024 calendar is dedicated to the 20th anniversary of the Giuseppe e Pericle Lavazza Foundation, a non-profit that supports international sustainability projects in coffee-cultivating countries.

“I am so excited by opportunities to provide conversation around Africa and this amazing continent. But the theme itself, for me, was so powerful,” said 33-year-old Kenyan photographer Thandiwe Muriu. “I live in a very communal culture, and our way of life is ‘More than Us’ — you are always your neighbor’s keeper, and I deeply connected with that.”

Muriu was introduced to photography at 14 years old by her father, as part of a list of skills her parents wanted to teach her and her three sisters so they could be strong, independent women in an often-patriarchal society.

“When he put the camera in my hand, something happened,” she said. “I always enjoyed art, but I could never draw. I always enjoyed music, but I could never sing. But the camera just felt right, and it was almost like one of those moments in a movie. Photography just became the voice that I had been looking for to express everything that I was feeling and experiencing.”

Since then, Muriu has been perfecting her craft; from watching YouTube tutorials and reading photography magazines as a teenager, to meeting other photographers and learning from their experience while she studied for a marketing degree.

Today, Muriu’s photographs focus on three ultimate truths about herself which she says shape how she views the world: “I’m a woman, I’m African, and I love color.” This informed her four photographs in the Lavazza calendar, focusing on female models, and creating colorful illusions that haven’t been digitally enhanced.

“Beyond that, every work I produce is paired with an African proverb,” said Muriu. “I realized I come from a culture that historically was not one that did images. It recorded wisdoms, learnings, lessons in words. So this work in a way has become archival, an archive of proverbs that we don’t use anymore that could be forgotten if I didn’t bring them back into use in my work.”

For 31-year-old South African photographer and filmmaker Aart Verrips, the Lavazza project, and its emphasis on Africa and African creatives, is a big step forward in terms of recognition. “Being African and being on this continent, we are so many times deemed to be less a fit than someone that’s coming in from Europe, just because of where we are from,” he said. “So to be part of this is kind of amazing.”

Verrips originally studied to be a chef, and was completing a pastry course in the French Alps 10 years ago when a friend introduced him to photography.

For him, “More than Us” is about loyalty, and it taking a village to create something beautiful, just as each photograph has an entire team behind its creation, from stylists and makeup artists to assistants and agents.

“I brought that [theme] into every kind of image [for the Lavazza calendar],” said Verrips. “In ‘The Vanguard,’ which is the woman standing in the hand, that’s the people elevating her to do what she can do best and fight for gender equality.”

The theme of togetherness is at the heart of every image produced for the calendar, but it is most obvious in Nigerian photographer Daniel Obasi’s work. The intended meaning behind Obasi’s images continuously evolves, but his interests are firmly centered on community, and creating work that offers an opportunity for people to come together.

“Responding to emotions, understanding them and giving them a form in my visual world is important,” he said. “[More than Us] is unity. It’s lending our hands and voices for a common goal.”

Each of Obasi’s images tackles a different issue that requires a community to solve, including climate change, growth and development of the next generation, sexual violence against women, and innovating for the future of the planet.

Like Verrips and Muriu, Obasi picked up photography by chance, having first worked as a freelance stylist. He said a “visual story-telling awakening” happened when he traveled to Badagry in Lagos State, on a school exchange program.

“I was very much obsessed with how the sky ran into the ocean, the way the sands felt and how the sun always fell right against people’s skin as they passed me,” said Obasi. “There was just an overload of colors and beauty that I had to tap into it.”

Obasi says the Lavazza project gave him an opportunity to tell beautiful and positive African stories, where he was in control of the narrative; that’s something Kenyan photographer Muriu believes is essential.

“I think for many years as a continent, we’ve given away our stories, and we’ve not had the voice to tell our own stories,” said Muriu, adding the project is “an opportunity for us on a global scale, to sing our own songs and not just tell our own stories, but tell them in our style, in our distinct visual language.”

She sums up this sentiment with a single African proverb: “Until the lion has his own storyteller, the hunter will always have the best stories.”

For “I saw you there,” Obasi was so moved by the story of one of the Lavazza Foundation’s partners, the Panzi Foundation, which supports survivors of sexual violence, that he wanted to create an image that radiates hope. “The flowers are symbolic of care, love, hope and kindness, femininity,” he said. “Whilst the butterflies mean a renewal and rebirth.”

In February 2010, Australian photographer Jim McFarlane was documenting local children at an after-school club in Gaza City. Teachers had asked each child to bring in a sentimental item – something important to them. “One young boy, maybe 12 years old, brought along a blue plastic bag,” McFarlane tells me, his voice breaking. “Inside the bag were some bomb fragments and a tin, and inside the tin were the ashes of his father, who he saw get killed. That’s something I’ll always remember.”

The emotional encounter was one of many during a 10-day assignment in Gaza, where McFarlane was working as part of a trio of international photographers. They were there to document the lives of people in the wake of the Israeli incursion of December 27, 2008, known as Operation Cast Lead, which took place a year previously, and killed 1,417 Gazans, including 313 children. Thirteen Israelis, including three civilians, were killed in the period’s violence, four from friendly fire.

The driving force behind the photographic mission, which was supported by Save the Children, was Lebanese-English photographer Anthony Dawton, who’d been working in the West Bank with children’s charity Al Madad Foundation. Dawton brought along McFarlane, a colleague and close friend he’d met while living in Melbourne in the 1980s, and Italian photographer Giuseppe Aquili, who’d started out as Dawton’s assistant. Their backgrounds were in commercial photography, including weddings and advertising, but all found documentary photography more rewarding. “We want to show the reality of life in the places we work,” McFarlane says.

The trio’s 2010 Children of Gaza exhibition raised more than £150,000 for Save the Children in Gaza. Their images have been collected again for Ten Days in Gaza, a new book that the photographers crowdfunded after the recent Israeli offensive, following Hamas’s 7 October terror attack, with all funds from sales again going to Save the Children.

It took six months to arrange permissions for their 2010 trip, the three men entering from Israel via the Erez crossing. “The destruction was intense,” says Aquili. “It was evident everywhere we went: people trying to rebuild or places still literally falling apart. The invasion had levelled so many buildings. People were dejected.”

Currently, 2 million people live on 365 square kilometres of land in Gaza, which contains eight refugee camps. “It was dreadful to see the conditions people were living in,” Dawton tells me. “Even the houses that were still standing had nothing you could call a modern convenience. People lived on nothing but they were kind and hospitable. All they were left with was education. We went to a girls’ school that had been bombed. The teachers were still teaching in the rubble. They were reading Charles Dickens – they asked me to take the class for 10 minutes. Moments like those uplifted me.”

Photographers working together is unusual, but the trio found benefits in their partnership. “It gave me freedom and safety,” explains Aquili. “When you work on your own, you worry about missing the moment – you’re trying to capture everything. But as there were two other photographers, I knew I could open my eyes, look around more, and maybe listen to a story, instead of taking pictures of everything.”

Since Gaza, Dawton and McFarlane have collaborated on other projects, including Syrian refugee camps in Jordan, Palestinian camps in Lebanon, and the city of Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh, home to more than 1 million Rohingya Muslims who fled Myanmar. Aquili now works as a pastry chef in Italy.

Their experiences in Gaza made a lasting impact. “It made me realise how alike we all are,” says Aquili. “If you take away the regional and cultural differences, and look at the kids and families, they’re just people trying to make the best with what they have. Even among all the destruction and sacrifices they have to make, that was what the parents were thinking about: to try to better their lives and give their children hope for the future.

Five more photographs from the book

Anthony Dawton
“We were taken to a shelled building on the edge of Beit Hanoun. Apart from this boy, his sister and baby brother, the house seemed deserted. The boy took me to this shell hole in the wall and said the shell only just missed him. He adopted a look that made him seem older. I realised, belatedly, that I was looking at shellshock.”

Giuseppe Aquili
“I found this scene just outside Beit Lahiya. This Gaza road laid bare the contrast between the two countries, with smooth tarmacked roads and modern cars in Israel set against the scene here: donkeys pulling makeshift carts, no pavements and the piled-up steel wire evidence of severe bomb damage.”

Anthony Dawton
“We came across this street in Gaza City and saw a bunch of kids on our first day. It’s the cliche for photographers in conflict zones to show children reflecting the environment they have known since birth: the Kalashnikov, the stone-thrower, and the already traumatised child. Although some of that was true, we were to find the effect of growing up in Gaza was more complex and surprising.”

Giuseppe Aquili
“At this bombed playground, the destroyed slide looked like a stretcher. Had children been playing when the bomb fell? Would the strongest photograph involve children? After all, we had come to Gaza to photograph the children who lived there. I compromised. The children are walking in the middle distance, ghost-like.”

Anthony Dawton
“I observed this young girl in what turned out to be the ruins of her family house in Gaza City. She had a toy mobile phone hanging around her neck. I was told her mother had been killed when the house was bombed, and that the girl had tried to call her on her ‘phone’. It was one of those photographs I felt bad about taking, about intruding, even though it was taken using my longest lens, but I knew it had to be taken.”

Main image: Jim McFarlane
“The photograph was taken in Rafah in the south of Gaza, where the tunnels were. This was an area we were asked to avoid on safety grounds but the tunnels are such an important part of the Gaza story. The boy running across my frame gave the image scale and contrast to the destroyed building, and his energy gave poignancy to the photograph, or even hope.”

Ten Days in Gaza is published on 29 February (Pallas Athene, £40). An exhibition is also planned for a London venue (TBC) in March. More of Dawton and McFarlane’s work.

I know that fashion photographers often have to hold back on their own creativity to please clients. And we rarely get to see them realize their fullest strengths and potential — therefore embracing their truest selves with a sense of unconditional safety. It’s a beautiful thing that photographer David Seidner did for brands like Yves Saint Laurent and international editions of Vogue. His presence is felt in the work of photographers like Aline Smithson. And more importantly, his work is something that must be experienced in person. In fact, it’s the saving grace of the 2024 Winter Exhibitions for the International Center of Photography in NYC.

Many who’ve read this site are aware that I’ve had many issues with ICP. We can start by talking about the poor quality museum glass they use — which creates tons of reflections even at fair viewing distances. Let alone, there’s their lack of adherence to their mission around “concerned photography.” ICP is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year by displaying an exorbitant amount of photographs from its archives — complete with reflections and ill-advised use of its space. Transparently, the archives break my heart in a manner similar to how you’d feel if you found a close family member was involved in murder. Tucked away in the corner of the 2nd floor and seamlessly blending into the 50th-anniversary exhibit at one point is the work of fashion photographer David Seidner.

I’m in Love With Portraits by David Seidner

If the entire two floors were dedicated to just his archives, I would make weekly visits to sit, shut off mobile notifications, meditate, pay money, and become inspired by David’s phenomenal work. I’m sure that with each visit, I’d find something new to ponder to expand my creative brain.

Several photographers that we’ve interviewed on this website are inspired by paintings. We can see that in the work of Christy Lee Rogers and Mariska Karto just to name two. But when you actually look at David’s work, you’d think you were looking at a hyperrealistic painting. This is partially because of his printing process — which he was very much involved in and considered to be a part of the whole creative process. Here’s a quote from ICP’s description:

“Seidner made these portraits using platinum printing, a process invented in the late nineteenth century in which the image is absorbed into the paper rather than suspended in the emulsion that coats its surface, as with gelatin silver printing. Moreover, he opted for a textured and uncoated paper, to which he hand-applied the emulsion, leaving the brushstrokes visible at the edges of the image. Seidner thereby emphasized the handmade quality of the photographs. This devotion to making is also evident in the books and maquettes for the series (on view nearby), which he diligently preserved in his personal archive.”

International Center of Photography

This is art. It’s inspired by the past and translated through a photographer who channeled adoration of the scene in front of them with equal amounts of respect for the artists who have long passed. And it shines through in every step of the process into the final print — very much so in the same way that Michelin Star chefs use only the finest ingredients.

You Should Check it Out

There’s a lot to love here: photographs with beautiful colors that look like paintings due to the film stock, bleached prints, reflections that force you to stare at the photographs and wonder how the shot was achieved, fine details that are sharp and uncaring of MTF charts, and creativity that isn’t seen very often anymore. David Seidner passed a few years before social media took off. And considering the work that he’s done, I’m sure that he’d feel great sadness at the monotony that algorithms play with silencing the artistic self.

Best of all, there are far fewer reflections on David Seidner’s work — and I hope that his ghost visited the gallery and gently guided the setup crew to ensure this.

David Seidner: Fragments is on display at the International Center of Photography until May 6th 2024. I strongly recommend that you go check it out to understand and appreciate true fashion photography art.

SARANAC LAKE — Viewers may feel they’ve wandered into a dream when contemplating “Infrared Adirondacks,” a collection of photographs by Phil Gallo, which will be the featured show at the Adirondack Artists Guild located at 52 Main St., Saranac Lake.

The exhibit opens on Friday, Feb. 2 with a reception from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. and will run through Sunday, March 3.

Gallo, a Saranac Lake resident, used to see infrared photos in various magazines back in the ‘70s and when he was in college in the ‘60s.

“Scientific types of photos that showed different forests types and that kind of thing,” he said.

“The color ones were just off-the-wall weird looking. There was really not much in the way of color to them that was any kind of true color. There was a lot of magenta and that kind of thing. But the black-and-white, they had black-and-white infrared, that’s what really captured my attention because, again, there’s a lot of work that’s still done with infrared photography in forestry to determine the health of the trees and that sort of thing and the different species.”

Many of these images were aerial photographs, but there were others that were ground level.

“I just thought that the contrast in them was really appealing,” Gallo said.

“It was so very different, very high contrast. As I say in my statement, there is living deciduous foliage and also things like grasses and herbaceous plants and those kind of things that are very highly reflective of the infrared spectrum.

“So 80 % or more of the infrared light that hits those things bounces off and is reflected back to the viewer if there is viewer, a photographer, whatever.”

Water and sky absorb infrared rays and come out very, very dark, and in some instances, just black.

“Whereas the trees and grasses are just gleaming white,” he said.

“That is at the extreme end. A lot of my photos are sort of in between because the intensity of that contrast varies from by time of day, the time of year, the intensity of the sunlight. There are lot of factors, so you don’t have that stark black-and-white effect in every photo. But, you do get it. Other trees, like the evergreen for instance, they are not as reflective of infrared so they tend to be more mid-range.”

Gallo started playing around with infrared film around 1975. He found it awkward and expensive to send away to get developed and printed. He didn’t stick with it, and he revisited it in the ‘90s with large-format film and that was even more expensive.

“I just couldn’t afford it at the time,” he said.

Gallo crossed the digital divide, and when he owned his second digital camera, he had a conversation with Henry Kopf, who ran a photo shop in Saranac Lake.

“Henry had mentioned to me something about you could get filters for the camera that can filter out the visible light spectrum and the ultraviolet light spectrum and let the infrared in,” he said.

DIGITAL BREAKTHROUGH

Gallo was eager to try the process free of film, developing and chemicals.

“You screw up one roll of film, and you lose 36 pictures,” he said.

“Now with the digital stuff, it’s much easier. There are two ways to approach altering a digital camera so that you can do infrared photos.

“One is most digital cameras the sensor that’s in the camera has several coatings on it or filters they call them. They filter out different things so that the colors that the camera eventually provides to make an image are more true.”

These filters filter out infrared, but they don’t succeed in filtering it all out.

“They filter out a large percentage of it,” he said.

“Some will get through, but it won’t be enough to make a visible difference in the visible light spectrum image that results. So, you can have that removed from the sensor in your camera at which point you’ve got a camera that’s going have to be solely dedicated to that kind of photography, infrared photography.”

Gallo uses the second technique and uses screw-on glass filters.

“Which will do the same job, but because you still have that filter on the center that’s filtering out infrared, you have to let a lot more infrared into the camera.”

Gallo finds the filters very dark, hard to see through. He sets his aperture at F-9, the sweet spot for him. He also uses long exposures 12 to 20 seconds, and the camera is on a tripod.

Anything moving gets blurred.

There is a contrast between objects that are stationary and objects moving.

“It provides as almost surrealistic dynamism to the image,” he said.

Gallo kept doing it and has built a body of work over the last decade and a half. He’s entered the images in many shows and posts on Facebook to share with friends.

He’s never put together a group of images together, 18 for this show, that are printed on 13-by-19 inch paper and are framed.

“They have a real impact,” he said.

“I got hooked on this. I do other kinds of photography also, but this has become one of my favorites. You don’t do much in the winter, but I have done a few. They’re nice, but because of the lack of the kind of vegetation that summer provides, they lack that impact of spring, summer and fall. Interestingly, some people think it is the chlorophyll in the leaves and grass and that kind of thing that causes objects to reflect so much infrared.”

But vegetation photographed with autumnal colors exhibits the same amount of reflectivity, even though they are not green anymore.

Gallo gets three seasons. He’s done some studies of human subjects, but it’s hard a person to stay motionless for a long time.

“Something moves,” he said.

“Whereas with the wind moving something or water flowing and that being moving or those kinds of things, when a person moves it tends not to be as attractive. It doesn’t look good. It can, but on the whole it’s a lot more challenging, and I just haven’t spent that much time doing it. I have done a few, but they are not going to be in the show. One of them was in my nude show back in 2014.”

POINT OF FOCUS

The point of focus for infrared light spectrum is different from what it is for the visible light spectrum.

“You can re-calibrate your lenses and things like that so that they are more accurate in finding that point, but another problem is that point of focus shifts with the angle of the sun, time of day, and that kind of stuff,” Gallo said.

“So because your filter is so dark, if you have your camera stopped down, you can’t see anything. So you have to have it wide open as far open as it will go to let in maximum amount of light.

“You still can’t see real well but you can see well enough that you can sort of focus. But a lot of times you get it wrong.”

Gallo checks his image after every exposure to see what he’s got. That is something he couldn’t do with film.

“You can go back and you can look at what you just photographed in the camera and magnify it and do all that kind of stuff,” he said.

“To see, did I get this? What I do, I try to focus with the lens wide open and to take a picture I stop it down.

“The reason why I use a smaller aperture is because you get greater depth of field, which makes you get a longer focusing range. You’re more likely to have things the way you want to see them more properly in focused.”

Landscapes require a long range of focus. For close-ups, a blurry background is fine.

“But if you’re taking a scene and you’ve got a stream or lake in the foreground and a mountain in the background, at least for me, my aesthetic is I want them both to be in focus,” he said.

“So, I have to use that smaller aperture for the actual photo, which gives me a better chance of hitting that focus, but the thing is I still might not because I don’t really know where the focus point is.”

What Gallo sees with the lens wide open is still the minuscule of physical light getting through the filter.

“What I am focusing on is really as much as the visible spectrum as it is the infrared. It’s a real trial-and-error thing,” he said.

“Sometimes you it it right on the first time, and sometimes it’s four, five, six different attempts before you get it right. It takes a lot of patience. But the interesting thing is you kind of get a feel for the type of conditions that will give you an easier task with that.”

Late mornings and mid-afternoon is much easier than early morning or late afternoon.

“The funny thing about that is late afternoon and early morning are the sweet spots for visible light photography because your shadows are longer.

“The light has more red tones in it, especially in the afternoon they call it the ‘golden hour’ when you get closer to sunset for photographing.

“But it’s the opposite for infrared. You don’t just go out there, take a picture and go home. You have to try, try and try again. A lot of time you’re spending quite a bit of time getting bug-bit.”

‘A SENSE OF ENIGMA’

His infrared images convey at their best, a sense of enigma.

“That is something that’s always appealed to me since I was old enough to start appreciating art that was more than just stick figures,” Gallo said.

“I was always attracted to the surrealists and symbolists and those folks.”

Georgio de Chirricio, an Italian painter noted for his metaphysical works, predated the surrealist movement and was inspirational to them.

“One of his guiding lights had been to convey a sense of enigma in his images,” Gallo said.

“I find that rich ground. I really when you look at a picture and you are intrigued but you’re not really sure what’s going on but it’s cool. Some things aren’t quite right. When you look at one of these pictures, this is raw. If you look at it with the same criteria that you would judge a standard black-and-white image, this doesn’t look the way it should. That’s good.”