Photographs Of Celebrities Research Articles

The Technological Gaze

The Technological Gaze

Comparative advertising and celebrity photographs--fair dealing under the CDPA 1988

Comparative advertising and celebrity photographs--fair dealing under the CDPA 1988

Publicity exploitation of celebrities: protection of a star's style in Quebec civil law

The use of celebrity imagery, or style, in advertising has become prevalent in recent times. Occasionally advertisers have used photographs of celebrities without having first obtained their consent. The author examines the possible legal bases existing in Quebec civil law which may serve to protect the celebrity against such non-consesual use of his or her picture, drawing on the experience of France, common law in Canada and the United States. Concluding that the right to style is an intellectual property right, the author applies this basis to other instances of style appropriation : the use of voice, sound-alikes, look-alikes and typical expressions.

Observation distance and recognition of photographs of celebrities' faces.

Subjects were tested to assess the distance at which they could recognize the faces of celebrities (more specifically, a set of 44 portrait photographs of movie and television actors). The set of test photographs was shown initially at a distance of 200 ft. and then closer in increments of 20 ft. When the actor in a given photograph was identified, either by name, character role, or by the movie or television show in which the actor had starred, the recognition-distance was recorded and the photograph was removed from the test set. Those which were not recognized (even at the closest distance) were not included in the data summaries or statistical analysis. In calculating recognition-distance for each photograph, the values were adjusted to reflect the distance at which recognition would have occurred if all the faces were of normal size. The upper limit for recognition, as defined by the distance above which only 10% of the faces are identified, was just over 160 ft. for women, and just under 200 ft. for men. There was also a significant difference in mean recognition distance between women and men. The large range of recognition-distance (across photographs and across subjects) argues that the distance is not controlled primarily by the feature detail provided in a given photograph or by the discrimination and recall skills of the observer. More likely it is a function of diverse memory associations, so that the distance at which each photograph is recognized will depend on such factors as frequency and recency of exposure, perceived attractiveness, and how much the subject admires the celebrity.

Sports celebrity photographs and copyright law in the united states

Sports memorabilia collecting is a $3bn per year industry in the United States. One popular and easily obtained memento is the sports celebrity photograph. Protected by the Copyright Act 1976, owners of sports celebrity photographs are entitled to several exclusive rights that restrict other’s use of their photographs. This article discusses the key exceptions of United States law that enable sports memorabilia collectors to market, trade, buy, and sell photographs, as well as outlining the potential legal pitfalls collectors should avoid, such as the duplication of photographs and the display of photographs over the internet.

Ansel Adams and Louise Arner Boyd: A camera tells a story

Ansel Adams travelled to southern Utah in August 1953 to photograph three small towns not far from Zion National Park. With him was Dorothea Lange, recording aspects of the Mormon community from her very different perspective.1 At some point in their trip, Lange turned her Rolleiflex toward Adams, capturing an image of him halfway under his darkcloth as he looked into the focusing plane of his big, 8 x 10-inch, flatbed, aluminum body, Kodak camera.2 This portrait of Adams later became known around the world when clothing manufacturer GAP used it in the mid-1990s as part of a campaign to increase sales of men's and women's khaki slacks. They used black and white photographs of celebrities like Sarah Vaughan and Jack Kerouac wearing casual slacks overprinted with the caption ‘Ansel Adams [e.g.] wore khakis’. Adams's portrait was the only one in the series in which the face was not visible. In fact, in Lange's portrait none of Adams's features are visible — not his goofy ears, nor his distinctively crooked nose, nor his expressive eyebrows. He did not even strike a recognizable Ansel-like pose. Only bits of his non-descript fedora's crown and brim are visible, poking out from the back of the dark cloth. Yet we know without a doubt that this figure in the wrinkled khakis has to be Adams. Even the crass advertising executives of GAP knew that the viewer does not need to see Adams's face, because the monster camera is transformed into a believable icon for the best-known photographer of all time.

Unfinished Business: The Railroad in American Life by Maury Klein

416 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE ages of war, travel photography, and photography and literature. The authors do not dwell on technical details, but they do make clear the special properties of early forms of photography and the extent to which these encouraged certain social usages. Aside from a general contempt for French theorists emphatically expressed in the introduction (p. 4), I could not find any governing idea, but there are very fine illustrations, some in color. (All images are well-captioned as regards original size and technique.) Long on anecdote and short on analysis, this volume nevertheless can suggest fascinating areas for further research. A host of topics appear and then are dropped without sufficient discussion, such as the tendency of early photographers to combine their trade with dentistry, the use of carte-de-visite formats to sell luxury goods, the early appearance of collages in 1880s advertising, the invention of celebrity photographs, and the business practices of itinerant photographers. Other topics are latent but never really articulated, notably, the visual exploitation of women. The volume is particularly rich in material on the photo­ graphic profession and the social rituals of the studio, and in the hands of a cultural historian much more could be done with it. To the extent that this book has a theme, it is the complex role that photographers played in society during the first seventy-five years of the medium’s existence. Yet the systematic development of all themes is vitiated by the authors’ refusal to explore cultural differences. En­ glish, American, French, German and central European examples and anecdotes are jumbled together indiscriminately, plus the occasional item from Argentina or Russia. This potpourri escapes the narrow con­ fines ofnational histories but misses the opportunity to be comparative. Overall, the volume depicts the state of much previous photographic research, which Heinz Henisch did so much to foster as the founding editor of the journal History and Photography. His retirement and this publication mark the end of an era characterized by enterprising dis­ covery and collection, whose visible results are everywhere apparent in this handsome volume. Perhaps inevitably, it displays more breadth than analysis, while opening many avenues to future research. David E. Nye Dr. Nye is professor of American studies at Odense University. His Electrifying America: Social Meanings ofa New Technology won SHOT’s 1993 Dexter Prize. His other books include Image Worlds: Corporate Identities at General Electric (1985) and American Technological Sublime (1994). Unfinished Business: The Railroad in American Life. By Maury Klein. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1994. Pp. 226; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $24.95. Maury Klein has taken advantage of his leadership in the field of railroad history to publish Unfinished Business, a compilation of articles TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 417 and talks that have served as working papers for his research of the last twenty-six years. Covering the entire span of railroad history, from the 1820s to the present, the essays deal with specific case studies in the building and rebuilding of American railroads, focusing on the businessmen who made policy and raised money for construction. Taken together, the articles portray an author who is discontented with the state of research in railroad history and wants to sketch out some guidelines for future inquiry. While the articles were not written with reference to each other, they work together to confront the problems of early building in the 1830s, the struggle for rebuilding in the Reconstruction South, the building boom in the North and far West after the Civil War, the depression of 1893 and the subsequent need to completely reor­ ganize the railroads and rebuild them to incorporate improvements in railroad technology, the effect of regulation on the ability of Amer­ ican railroads to provide needed technological innovations, and the successes and failures in introducing replacement technology to the railroads of the 20th century. In almost every essay, Klein pinpoints those business leaders, among successive generations of railroad men, who had a key impact on the where and how of construction, and he evaluates this influ­ ence. In each instance, from the southern railroad presidents of the 1870s and E. H. Harriman at...

The Photographic Experience, 1839–1914: Images and Attitudes by Heinz K. Henisch and Bridget A. Henisch

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 415 James Brittain’s recent biography of Ernst Alexanderson has shown that workmen with mechanical know-how in the model shops of large companies like General Electric and the Radio Corporation of America still provided essential problem-solving collaboration to the inventors whose names appeared alone on the patents. A shift similar to what happened in telegraphy took place in other science-based industries like electrochemicals. In the case of aluminum, for in­ stance, the electrochemical pilot facility run by the Cowles brothers in upstate New York, where inventors could come and try out their ideas, disappeared when the Aluminum Company of America grew to dominance. It may be accurate to say that the essential change in the pattern of innovation at the turn of the century was less that the laboratory replaced the inventing workshop, as it has appeared look­ ing back through the lens of Big Science, than that the corporation absorbed both the laboratory and the workshop, the two coexisting inside the corporation as sources of invention until World War II. What disappeared not long after the turn of the century was not the workshop as source of invention, but the independent inventing establishment that could produce breakthroughs threatening to the continued success of the large science-based corporation. Margaret B. W. Graham Dr. Graham is a founding director of the Winthrop Group. From 1991-94 she managed research information and infrastructure at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. Previously, she taught management of technology at Boston University’s School of Management. Her publications include RCA and the VideoDisc: The Business ofResearch and RidI) for Industry: A Century of Technical Innovation at Alcoa (with Bettye Pruitt), both from Cambridge University Press. The Photographic Experience, 1839—1914: Images and Attitudes. By Heinz K. Henisch and Bridget A. Henisch. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994. Pp. x + 462; illustrations, bibliography, index. $95.00. Lavishly illustrated and too heavy to hold in the hand while read­ ing, this volume is more than a coffee-table book but less than an integrated scholarly study. Heinz Henisch and Bridget Henisch at­ tempt to merge a collector’s eye and enthusiasm for rarities with an interest in popular culture in a series of essays that each traverses a good bit of the seventy-five years under study. The topical organiza­ tion allows one to read the fifteen chapters individually or in any order. Each has its own detailed bibliography, so that the book serves as an introduction to specialist literature on such matters as early terminology, early advertising by photographers, fashion and pho­ tography, the variety of photographic cases and packaging, family photographs, retouching and overpainting, legal uses of photo­ graphs, photographs in illustrated books, photographic humor, im­ 416 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE ages of war, travel photography, and photography and literature. The authors do not dwell on technical details, but they do make clear the special properties of early forms of photography and the extent to which these encouraged certain social usages. Aside from a general contempt for French theorists emphatically expressed in the introduction (p. 4), I could not find any governing idea, but there are very fine illustrations, some in color. (All images are well-captioned as regards original size and technique.) Long on anecdote and short on analysis, this volume nevertheless can suggest fascinating areas for further research. A host of topics appear and then are dropped without sufficient discussion, such as the tendency of early photographers to combine their trade with dentistry, the use of carte-de-visite formats to sell luxury goods, the early appearance of collages in 1880s advertising, the invention of celebrity photographs, and the business practices of itinerant photographers. Other topics are latent but never really articulated, notably, the visual exploitation of women. The volume is particularly rich in material on the photo­ graphic profession and the social rituals of the studio, and in the hands of a cultural historian much more could be done with it. To the extent that this book has a theme, it is the complex role that photographers played in society during the first seventy-five years of the medium’s existence...