CONVERSATION WITH JAMES DANZIGER / COMMENTARY ON 'MOONRISE' AI / VINCE ALETTI'S BOOK OF THE MONTH / PORTFOLIO OF THE WEEK : KAI-UWE GUNDLACH / THE LIST / OLIVER WASOW'S BLOWS AGAINST THE EMPIRE
Every time I see a colorised image of a black and white image or video it’s extremely tacky. Same with this. It’s tasteless. Go make your own art. Do the work. This is just an horrible money grab no matter you twist and turn it.
I read this discussion around your AI-assisted color version of Moonrise with great interest. One aspect of it particularly caught my attention because I wrote a college textbook, Photography: Focus on Profit (Allworth Press, 2002), about the business side of photography, including legal issues involving fair use, appropriation, and the close approximation of existing work.
I do not question your admiration for Adams, nor do I doubt that the project was undertaken with genuine affection for the original photograph. But I do think the discussion risks blurring several very different issues: legality, authorship, ethics, taste, and the commercial use of an artist’s reputation.
Yes, there certainly is a legal question, albeit narrower than the moral and artistic one. If Moonrise is indeed in the public domain, then you may have the legal right to make, sell, or distribute a derivative interpretation. But that does not make the work immune from criticism, nor does it settle the question of whether the use of Adams’s name, reputation, and visual authority creates an implied association that many viewers will understandably find troubling.
Copyright law is quite explicit about derivative works when the underlying work is still protected. Under 17 U.S.C. § 106(2), the copyright owner has the exclusive right “to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work.” And 17 U.S.C. § 101 defines a derivative work as one based on a preexisting work, including a work that has been “recast, transformed, or adapted.” That is why cases such as Rogers v. Koons and Andy Warhol Foundation v. Goldsmith matter. In both cases, the courts, and in Goldsmith the U.S. Supreme Court, took seriously the rights of photographers when later, established artists built commercially valuable works from their photographs. I should add that Art Rogers and Lynn Goldsmith are both friends of mine, so I may be less detached from this question than a neutral observer. I have also had personal experience with the misappropriation of my own photographs.
The difference here may be public domain status. But even if the work is legally permissible, I still find the project troubling. Adams’s Moonrise is not merely an image of a place; it is an image made through Adams’s judgment, timing, exposure, printing, and repeated darkroom interpretation. Its meaning is inseparable from the black-and-white print. To add color in the name of showing “what Adams saw” risks misunderstanding the achievement of the photograph. Adams did not simply record Hernandez. He transformed it.
My objection is not to experimentation as such, but to the way this particular experiment borrows the authority of Adams while altering the very interpretive choices that made the photograph Adams’s. That is my reservation. The AI version may be legal. It may even be sincere. But sincerity and legality do not necessarily make it good, necessary, or respectful of the original act of authorship.
Since James Danziger is not an artist, his reinterpretation of "Moonrise", whether one claims it a brilliant use of AI, distastefully opportunistic, or downright crass, has no legitimacy.
YES to the Kai-Uwe Gundlach Portfolio 🤩 🤗 🤩 A supremely versatile and talented artist, and a lovely person, too.
Every time I see a colorised image of a black and white image or video it’s extremely tacky. Same with this. It’s tasteless. Go make your own art. Do the work. This is just an horrible money grab no matter you twist and turn it.
I read this discussion around your AI-assisted color version of Moonrise with great interest. One aspect of it particularly caught my attention because I wrote a college textbook, Photography: Focus on Profit (Allworth Press, 2002), about the business side of photography, including legal issues involving fair use, appropriation, and the close approximation of existing work.
I do not question your admiration for Adams, nor do I doubt that the project was undertaken with genuine affection for the original photograph. But I do think the discussion risks blurring several very different issues: legality, authorship, ethics, taste, and the commercial use of an artist’s reputation.
Yes, there certainly is a legal question, albeit narrower than the moral and artistic one. If Moonrise is indeed in the public domain, then you may have the legal right to make, sell, or distribute a derivative interpretation. But that does not make the work immune from criticism, nor does it settle the question of whether the use of Adams’s name, reputation, and visual authority creates an implied association that many viewers will understandably find troubling.
Copyright law is quite explicit about derivative works when the underlying work is still protected. Under 17 U.S.C. § 106(2), the copyright owner has the exclusive right “to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work.” And 17 U.S.C. § 101 defines a derivative work as one based on a preexisting work, including a work that has been “recast, transformed, or adapted.” That is why cases such as Rogers v. Koons and Andy Warhol Foundation v. Goldsmith matter. In both cases, the courts, and in Goldsmith the U.S. Supreme Court, took seriously the rights of photographers when later, established artists built commercially valuable works from their photographs. I should add that Art Rogers and Lynn Goldsmith are both friends of mine, so I may be less detached from this question than a neutral observer. I have also had personal experience with the misappropriation of my own photographs.
The difference here may be public domain status. But even if the work is legally permissible, I still find the project troubling. Adams’s Moonrise is not merely an image of a place; it is an image made through Adams’s judgment, timing, exposure, printing, and repeated darkroom interpretation. Its meaning is inseparable from the black-and-white print. To add color in the name of showing “what Adams saw” risks misunderstanding the achievement of the photograph. Adams did not simply record Hernandez. He transformed it.
My objection is not to experimentation as such, but to the way this particular experiment borrows the authority of Adams while altering the very interpretive choices that made the photograph Adams’s. That is my reservation. The AI version may be legal. It may even be sincere. But sincerity and legality do not necessarily make it good, necessary, or respectful of the original act of authorship.
Since James Danziger is not an artist, his reinterpretation of "Moonrise", whether one claims it a brilliant use of AI, distastefully opportunistic, or downright crass, has no legitimacy.