Hargreaves on Street Photography in the Service of the Male Gaze @CUHKofficial

Stuart Hargreaves, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Faculty of Law, is publishing ‘I’m a Creep, I’m a Weirdo’: Street Photography in the Service of the Male Gaze in Surveillance, Privacy and Public Space (Bryce Clayton Newell, Tjerk Timan, and Bert-Jaap Koops, eds., Routledge, 2018)(Routledge Studies in Surveillance). Here is the abstract.

This chapter considers two phenomena, both of which involve the digitally-mediated collection and sharing of images of people without their knowledge or consent. In the first, “creepshots,” individuals take surreptitious photographs and share them on online message boards. In the second, individuals scour virtual street maps (such as Google Street View) for “notable” images that are then placed elsewhere online for others to review. In both cases, there is a large and anonymous audience viewing the images. In both cases, women in public or quasi-public spaces are the overwhelming targets of this digital gaze. In both cases, the online commentary quickly becomes sexual in nature, and is frequently overtly hostile. This chapter argues that these practices implicate different kinds of harms — broader, more diffuse — than conventional privacy invasions. As such, rather than being understood through the rubric of ‘privacy’ they are better understood as a new form of public surveillance. Consequently, legal mechanisms grounded in the typical (liberal) dichotomous understanding of what is public and what is private are unlikely to prove an adequate solution.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Munshi on Race, Citizenship, and the Visual Archive @GeorgetownLaw

Sherally Munshi, Georgetown University Law Center, is publishing 'You Will See My Family Became so American': Race, Citizenship, and the Visual Archive in Law and the Visual: Representation, Technologies, and Critique (Desmond Manderson, ed., 2018). Here is the abstract.

In 1932, the United States government sought to cancel the citizenship of Dinshah Ghadiali, an immigrant from India, alleging that Ghadiali “by reason of his not being a free white person or a person of African nativity or descent is, and was, ineligible racially for naturalization.” Ghadiali was one of dozens of Indian immigrants targeted for denaturalization in the wake of United States v. Thind (1923), in which the Supreme Court declared that “Hindus,” though capable of cultural assimilation, would remain visually unassimilable. At his denaturalization trial, Ghadiali submitted into evidence a series of photographs, assuring the judge, “You will see my family became so American.” How do these photographs purport to show that Ghadiali and his family had become “so American”? In this essay, through a through a close reading of Ghadiali’s photography, I explore a tension between the visualization of race—a practice at once institutionalized by law and inextricably bound with the medium of photography—and the performance of national belonging.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

A Series on Law and the Arts at the University of Malaga Faculty of Law @jcalvo11

Beginning March 9, the University of Malaga School of Law is hosting a series of seminars on Art and Law. The March 9th lecture features Professors Jose Calvo Gonzalez and Maria Pina Fersini discussing law and architecture. On April 12, Professor Felipe Navarro Martinez will discuss law and literature, Professor Jose Manuel Cabra Apalategui will discuss law and music, and Professor Cristina Monereo Atienza will discuss law and photography. On May 3, Professor Jose Francisco Alenza Garcia will discuss law in Game of Thrones.

More here.

Chalmers on The Chameleon Subject: Representation, Law, and the Problem of Living Dead @MelbLawSchool

Shane Chalmers, Institute for International Law and the Humanities, Melbourne Law School, is publishing The Chameleon Subject — Representation, Law, and the Problem of Living Dead, in Law, Culture, and the Humanities. Here is the abstract.

This essay is concerned with the life of the subject that is always also an object. More specifically, it is concerned with the condition of being exposed to death by law, and how this is a condition of the living subject. The essay examines this condition through analysis of two photographs by Joseph Moise Agbodjélou and Leonce Raphael Agbodjélou. These photographs enable us to see how representation is critical to the emancipation of the subject, creating the conditions for the ‘customisation’ of existence. They also enable us to see how law, like photography, is not to be perfected by transcending its representational frameworks. The critical work is ensuring such frameworks remain media of an ‘autonomous subjectivation’. The autonomous subject here is the emancipated subject: a living dead figure whose ‘autonomy’ marks her off from the death-like petrifaction of mere representation without slipping into the conceit of a god-like subjectivity.

Download the article from SSRN at the link. 

A Special Issue on Law and Popular Culture From the Journal of the Oxford Centre for Socio-Legal Studies @OxfordCSLS

Now published:

Special issue of the Journal of Oxford Center for Socio-Legal Studies: Law and Popular Culture (Issue 3, 2017).

This issue includes

Opening matters, by Pedro Fortes and Michael Asimow

Foreword: The Funhouse Mirror: Law and Popular Culture, by Lawrence M. Friedman

Jewish Lawyers on Television, by Michael Asimow

Outside But Within: The Normative Dimension of the Underworld in the Television Series "Breaking Bad" and "Better Call Saul," by Manuel A. Gomez


The Portrayal of the Corporate Lawyer on TV: The US and British Models from L.A. Law To Trust and Suits, by Peter Robson

Lights, Camera, Affirmative Action: Does Hollywood Protect Minorities? by Pedro Rubim Borges Fortes

Photography's Transformation: Its Influence on Culture and Law, by Henry J. Steiner 

Law and Opera: Stimuli to a Sensible Perception of Law, by Gabriel Lacerda
 
More Human Than Human: How Some Science Fiction Presenta AI's Claims to the Right to Life and Self-Determination, by Christine A. Corcos

Law and Literature: A Dilettante's Dream? by William Twining 

Wire From the Field: Tackling Visual Knowledge: The Story of the Yale Visual Law Project, by Sandra Ristovska


Book Review: Law and Popular Culture: A Course Book by Michael Asimow and Shannon Mader

Adler on the Pleasures of Punishment: Complicity, Spectatorship, and Abu Ghraib

Amy Adler, New York University School of Law, has published The Pleasures of Punishment: Complicity, Spectatorship, and Abu Ghraib, in Photography in Punishment in Popular Culture 236 (Austin Sarat and Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., eds., 2015). Here is the abstract.

At the same time that the Supreme Court has come to insist on a radical distinction between representations of sex and violence as a matter of constitutional law, never have the two genres been more deeply intertwined, in popular entertainment, of course, but also in certain practices of punishment. This paper considers the phenomenon of “torture porn” to explore not only representations of torture and humiliation in popular culture, but also the ways in which popular culture has shaped practices of punishment. Here I explore photographs of Abu Ghraib (as well as other legal and cultural disputes over the disclosure of photographs of torture) to explore the ways in which the popular vernaculars of pornography and smart phone photography informed the practice of torture. I compare the photos to a burgeoning genre of reality TV shows from the same era in which in which the spectacle of humiliation, punishment and even torture plays a pivotal and seemingly pleasurable role in the drama. In both scenarios, I focus not only on the mixture of sexuality and violence, pleasure and punishment, but also on the critical role of the camera. Ultimately by analyzing the similarities between “torture porn” in popular entertainment and the visual materials produced at Abu Ghraib, I suggest a mutually productive relationship between popular culture and punishment.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link. 

A New Book on Authorship and Copyright From Mark Rose

Mark Rose, Professor of English, University of California, Santa Barbara, is publishing Authors in Court: Scenes from the Theater of Copyright (Harvard University Press, 2016). Here is a description of the contents from the publisher's website.

Through a series of vivid case studies, Authors in Court charts the 300-year-long dance between authorship and copyright that has shaped each institution’s response to changing social norms of identity, privacy, and celebrity. Authors’ self-presentations in court are often inflected by prevailing concepts of propriety and respectability. And judges, for their part, have not been immune to the reputation and standing of the authors who have appeared before them in legal dramas. Some authors strut their roles on the public stage. For example, Napoleon Sarony—the nineteenth-century photographer whose case established that photographs might be protected as works of art—was fond of marching along Broadway dressed in a red fez and high-top campaign boots, proclaiming his special status as a celebrity. Others, such as the reclusive J. D. Salinger, enacted their dramas precisely by shrinking from attention. Mark Rose’s case studies include the flamboyant early modern writer Daniel Defoe; the self-consciously genteel poet Alexander Pope; the nineteenth-century abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe; the once-celebrated early twentieth-century dramatist Anne Nichols, author of Abie’s Irish Rose; and the provocative contemporary artist Jeff Koons. These examples suggest not only how social forms such as gender and gentility have influenced the self-presentation of authors in public and in court but also how the personal styles and histories of authors have influenced the development of legal doctrine.

Photography, Originality, and Copyright Law

Terry S. Kogan, University of Utah College of Law, is publishing The Enigma of Photography, Depiction, and Copyright Originality in volume 25 of the Fordham Intellectual Property, Media & Entertainment Law Journal. Here is the abstract.

Photography is an enigma. The features that distinguish it most from other art forms — the camera’s automatism and the photograph’s verisimilitude — have throughout its history also provided the basis for critics to claim that a photographer is not an artist nor the photograph a work of art. Because every photograph is the product of an automatic, mechanical device, critics argue that a photographer is a mere technician relegated to clicking a shutter button. Moreover, because every photograph displays an exact likeness of whatever happened to be sitting before the camera, critics consider that image to be a factual document devoid of creativity. Looking to the technology’s automatism and verisimilitude, modern legal skeptics have joined this chorus by arguing that most photographs are inevitably uncreative facts — in the words of one scholar, the “automated representation of reality” — and thereby undeserving of copyright protection.

This is the first Article to propose that borrowing the concept of depiction from art theory can shed considerable light on photographic originality. As a depiction, a photograph has what philosopher Richard Wollheim has described as “two folds.” The “first fold” refers to the design markings on the surface of the photographic paper. The “second fold” refers to the real world object or scene that a viewer perceives in those design markings. This Article’s fundamental thesis is that, for purposes of copyright law, a photograph’s originality inheres primarily in a photographer’s creative choices that result in the placement of surface design markings. In contrast, the object or scene that a viewer sees in a photograph rarely impacts the image’s originality. Accordingly, the claim by legal skeptics that most photographs are uncreative facts locates photographic originality in the wrong place — in the object or scene that a viewer sees in the picture (depiction’s second fold). If, instead, a photograph’s originality depends primarily on a photographer’s creative choices in placing surface design markings (depiction’s first fold), the attack on originality based on automatism and verisimilitude — on a photograph’s inevitably being an uncreative fact — collapses.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Picturing Crime

The National Endowment for the Humanities is funding the digitization of 30,000 photographs dating from 1914 to 1975 in the archives of the New York Police Department's Department of Records and
Information Services. These photographs will then be available for online viewing. More here from the New York Times and Hyperallergic.

Photographers' Rights, Copyright Protection, and Cultural Heritage

Thomas Margoni, University of Amsterdam, Institute for Information Law (IViR), has published The Digitisation of Cultural Heritage: Originality, Derivative Works and (Non) Original Photographs. Here is the abstract.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the legal consequences of the digitisation of cultural heritage institutions' archives and in particular to establish whether digitisation processes involve the originality required to trigger new copyright or copyright-related protection.

As the European Commission and many MS reported, copyright and in particular "photographers rights" are cause of legal uncertainty during digitisation processes. A major role in this legally uncertain field is played by the standard of originality which is one of the main requirements for copyright protection. Only when a subject matter achieves the requested level of originality, it can be considered a work of authorship. Therefore, a first key issue analysed in this study is whether – and under which conditions – digitisation activities can be considered to be original enough as to constitute works (usually a photographic work) in their own right. A second element of uncertainty is connected with the type of work eventually created by acts of digitisation. If the process of digitisation of a (protected) work can be considered authorial, then the resulting work will be a derivative composed by two works: the original work digitally reproduced and the – probably – photographic work reproducing it. Finally, a third element of uncertainty is found in the protection afforded to "other photographs" by the last sentence of Art. 6 Term Directive and implemented in a handful of European countries.

Accordingly, the paper is structured as follows: Part I is dedicated to the analysis of copyright law key concepts such as the originality standard, the definition of derivative works and the forms of protection available in cases of digital (or film-based) representations of objects (photographs). The second part of the study is devoted to a survey of a selection of EU Member States in an attempt to verify how the general concepts identified in Part I are applied by national legislatures and courts. The selected countries are Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Poland, the Netherlands and the UK. The country analysis fulfils a double function: on the one hand it provides a specific overview of the national implementation of the solutions found at international and EU level. On the other hand, it constitutes the only possible approach in order to analyse the protection afforded by some MS to those "other photographs" (also called non original photographs or mere/simple photographs) provided for by the last sentence of Art. 6 Copyright Term Directive. Part III presents some conclusions and recommendations for cultural heritage institutions and for legislatures.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.

The Naked City

In an exhibit called The International Center of Photography is once again highlighting stark and captivating photography of  New York by Weegee (Usher or Ascher Fellig, born 1899, died 1968). Photos taken from The Weegee Guide To New York (Prestel, 2015).

The ICP has devoted other exhibits to Weegee: see here.

Tip of the beret to Doug Coulson.

Exhibits Devoted To Sherlock Holmes, At the Museum of London

The Museum of London has mounted a new exhibition devoted to exploring the enduring attraction of the man in the deerstalker. Entitled Sherlock Holmes: The Man Who Never Lived and Will Never Die, the exhibit runs through April 12, 2015. Also of interest: fashion photography by Kasia Wosniak, called He Wasn't An Easy Gentleman To Describe, and Mind Maze, a graphic interpretation of Holmes's mind.

The Civil War In Photographs: At NOMA Beginning January 31st

A new photography exhibit opens at the New Orleans Museum of Art January 31 and runs through May 4: Photography and the American Civil War.

Weegee's Works

James Polchin on the photographer Weegee (Arthur Fellig) and his images of crime, currently on view in a retrospective, Weegee: Murder Is My Business, at the International Center of Photography, New York through September 2.

The History of Hysteria, In Photographs

NPR's Jessica Loudis takes a look at Asti Hustvedt's Medical Muses: Hysteria in Nineteenth Century Paris, a new book examining the women confined to the notorious Salpetriere Hospital in Paris, the treatment of their condition, which was dubbed "hysteria," and the effects and stories about that threatment then and now. Says Ms. Loudis in part,

Nowhere was hysteria's uneasy relationship to science more apparent than in photographs. Andre Breton once called hysteria the "greatest poetic discovery of the late 19th century," a notion that lingers below the surface of clinical observation. Like Muybridge's images of horses in motion, Charcot used photography as a mode of forensics and a means to parse illness. For the neurologist, a lifelong doodler, "art became a method to immobilize the tumultuous fits of his patients and order the savage thrashing into a sequence of static images." It's no coincidence that "Augustine," Charcot's most documented hysteric, arrived at the hospital in 1875, the same year that its first darkroom was installed. But more than a century later, these photos — many of which have the macabre look of a still from a Bela Lugosi film — are in no way native to the realm of medicine. Instead, Hustvedt uses them to highlight the historically foggy divide between science and art.

More here. The book is published by Norton.