Protecting our work
Back in the day when we got our wallet of prints from the chemist, they were accompanied by the negatives in a small pouch at the front. Most people never gave these much attention as the nice pile of gloss prints were what they were after. Every now and again, when a good picture of someone was viewed the subject would say something like, “I love that, can you send me the negative?”. I heard this loads of times but very much doubt if the negative was ever sent due to the negatives being ditched with the wallet they came in or if it was sent it would be so scratched due to poor handling it would be unusable. On the other hand, all of my negatives were treated like gold-dust and are all filed away in archive pages and wallets. This has enabled me to resurrect them as scanned digital images. I also maintained control over my work. I would never release a negative. If someone wanted a copy of a photo I would get that printed and if I was happy it looked of good quality I would pass it on. Only once have I sent a negative to someone through the mail and it wasn’t a pleasant experience. It was one of my favourite images and it was needed by the customer for high resolution scanning for a poster they wanted to produce of it. I was very nervous the entire time it was out of my possession, even though it was insured and had full Royal Mail tracking etc. It was returned safely.
It was a shame that people at the time didn’t realise it was the negatives that were the most important part of the package, not the prints.
Now that we are in the age of digital image files and the internet, things are very different and the challenges of protecting our work are huge. File transfer is instantaneous. This also means that image copying and pasting is also instantaneous. Keeping our work under our control is impossible and once an image appears on-line it is out there for the world to copy and maybe even pass off as their own work. Some photographers will use watermarks on every image they post online with something like “© Joe Bloggs” either in the corner or across the image. I have never like watermarks, always looks like vandalism. They are easy to remove these days too with AI driven features in post processing software. We can place a copyright statement in the meta data of the digital image file but who reads that? Another way is to disable the mouse right-click feature to prevent anyone saving the image. That too is futile as screen grabbers enable you to frame any image and save it as a screenshot. It is worth pointing out at this point that saving an image off of a computer screen will get you a low resolution copy of only a few Mb max. If the intention is to make a quality print from it you will be disappointed. So in summary it is therefore almost impossible to protect your work once it is out there. It is something we all have to live with these days.
All of my photos are my copyright and this is stated on my website and on my books and prints. I have given some organisations permission to reproduce selected images so long as I get full credit, they are listed as “© Peter Degnan” and mention of my books is made. I am comfortable with that but will challenge anyone who posts my work without credit being given, especially if they are trying to either give the impression it is their work or if they are trying to make financial gain from it.
