Month: May 2007

NOTE: We have sent a copy of this to the WPPD team, and will be happy to include their response. Were it not for the time-sensitive nature of the material, we would have done so prior to publication.

I was psyched for Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day this year. I packed up a bunch of film and headed to a friend’s birthday BBQ and brought an extra camera along in case anybody else wanted to try. They were good sports and let me make blurry pictures of them, and we all had fun. I picked up the 7 rolls of 120 I shot yesterday, got home, and got down to editing. I picked an image to upload to this year’s WPPD gallery, loaded up the submission form, read the rules governing submissions, and was extremely disturbed. I sat down and went through them, line by line, with Katie Cooke, who was also ready to upload an image. This is what we found:

(1) WPPD is a non-commercial event, open to everybody, everywhere in the world. Participation in WPPD is completely free; there are no submission fees, and no charges for exhibiting on the WPPD web site.

Great idea! Pinhole photography, fun, not making the artists pay, sounds good! But as always, you have to read the fine print:

(5) [the photograph] can be of any subject.

Well, not really. See rules 7 and 10.

(7) [the photograph] must respect common decency and human rights (no pornography).

Common decency where? Sweden or Saudi Arabia? If you aggregated everyone’s ideas of common decency, you wouldn’t be able to submit much. Female hair? Nope, no-go for some Muslims. Soles of feet or shoes? Serious insult in Thailand. Female breasts in America are “indecent”, in Europe, they’re fine. Europe has more people. Which is more common between them?

Then there are the people like us, for whom the entire concept of censoring everything so as not to offend anyone, anywhere, goes against common decency and sense. Not offending anyone is simply not possible. Hell, photography itself is against common decency in some parts of the world. Congratulations, you just invalidated WPPD’s entire existence. If you really believe this, it’s time to quit photography altogether.

And part of our definition of common decency is that people not imply an inherent equation between pornography and disrespect for human rights.

This also contradicts rule 5 above.

(9) [the photograph] must not have been previously published.

a) Why? This is not a rhetorical question.

b) If they are actually trying to grab at least a window of exclusivity—which alone would prevent either of us from submitting work, because it seems unreasonable and pointless—this isn’t going to do it. You are following this rule if you upload it to WPPD, and then your own site, or Flickr, 10 seconds later. What exactly does this accomplish? Nothing, other than setting up an arbitrary and useless hoop to jump through. Who are the WPPD team to tell anyone in which order they may upload things?

c) What, precisely, does “published” mean? In what media with what audience? If you put it in a protected area of your web site, or a photo sharing site, does that count as published?

(10) Each author must be able to provide proof that the submitted photograph is not contrary to other people’s fundamental rights. (The submitter must ensure that all allowances to photograph and publish pictures showing personal objects have been obtained by the models and/or owners of pictured objects.)

a) The first section of this rule is problematic. You want proof of a negative—which is generally impossible—for something that’s undefined? “Fundamental rights” can mean anything.

b) This is so poorly worded that it means that permission is required to show pictures of objects, but not of people, and the permission has to be granted to the owners of the objects. We don’t think this was the meaning the organizers were looking for, and would suggest they meant, “The submitter must ensure that all permissions to photograph and publish pictures showing people or personal objects have been obtained from the models and/or owners of pictured objects.”

Assuming that the rule is intended to mean that it is the photographer needs these permissions, we run into some more trouble:

i) Permission to depict “personal objects”? Again, we’ve got another term that’s so vague as to be meaningless. As potential submitters, we have no idea what this means, and therefore have no idea which images are acceptable to submit and which are not.

ii) Permission isn’t defined, either, which is a real problem. In the US, it’s legal to photograph anything in public view (with a few exceptions for military bases and the like), because in public, there is no reasonable expectation of privacy. Therefore, one could argue—as many have successfully done in court [most recently, see Nussenzweig v. diCorcia, US]—that by simply being in public, one is implicitly consenting to have their person and accompanying objects photographed.

This seems to be a wholly unreasonable demand. If you wanted to submit a photo of a street, would you have to get an OK from the owner of every car, building, and shop? What about litter? Each piece belonged to someone at some point. Does the fact that something is abandoned make it no longer a personal object?

It seems the only way to know for sure that you’re not running afoul of this rule is to make sure that the only things depicted in the photo you submit are yourself and things that you own. This contradicts rule 5, “[the photograph] can be of any subject”.

(11) To be submitted, a so-called “submission” must include both a scanned photograph and a completed Submission Form.

This is fine in principle, but use of the word “scanned” is unnecessarily limiting and confusing. Rule 4 states, “[the photograph] can be made by using any photographic material: film, paper, liquid emulsion, B&W, color, and any photographic process.” “Any photographic process” includes digital, so why a scan? What about people who shoot their negatives with digital cameras because they don’t have scanners? Does the requirement of a scan mean that digital isn’t actually allowed? It’s included in “any photographic process”, because digital is a process takes in light (photo) and puts out an image (graph), but it isn’t named explicitly. And they said “and any photographic process”, not “or”. So what’s the deal?

(This is the problem with having an incomplete list of things in a set of rules. If you’re not going to list everything, why bother enumerating anything at all when “any photographic process” covers it nicely? When everything you list is analog and digital isn’t mentioned, it raises questions.)

(16) Members of the coordinating team have authority to interpret and apply all necessary rules to all submissions received and may use their descretion and judgment in deciding which images to accept for the exhibition. Their decisions are final.

So basically, here’s all the rules, but they don’t really matter because we can bend them any way we want, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

(18) The coordinating team reserves the right to modify the rules of the operation if they judge necessary; in such an event, decisions of the organizers are final.

This is dangerous, unacceptable bullshit! The coordinating team could retroactively change the usage rights to say, “ha ha, we own the copyright to your images now, sucker!”. Or reverse rule 1 and say, “surprise, there are entry and exhibition fees now, and since you already entered and exhibited, you owe us $1,000!”.

ARE YOU INSANE??!? No thanks. If you expect me to play by your ill thought-out rules, you’d damn well better do the same.

(20) The act of participating in the WPPD implies whole acceptance of all rules and conditions presented here.

What exactly constitutes “participating in WPPD”? Is it uploading a lensless image made on pinhole day to the WPPD web site? Is it participating in a pinhole workshop on the date of WPPD? Is it making any lensless image whatsoever on the date of WPPD?

This stunning lack of specificity means that they could be trying to say that any act of lensless imaging that occured on 29 April, 2007, are bound by these rules. This, combined with rule 18, is insanely dangerous. Not that it’s likely, but they could attempt a rights grab at an image made on the day by someone who’s never even heard of WPPD! This confusion could have been avoided by rewording this point to something along the lines of, “By uploading an image that is accepted for display on the pinholeday.org site, you agree that you have accepted all rules and conditions presented in this document”.

A serious legal concern with these rules is the dangerous combination of rules 18 and 20.

By accepting all the terms and conditions, you agree that you accept any possible changes to the rules that might be applied at any point in the future, and applied retroactively. While we don’t expect that the WPPD team would ever be evil, it’s foolish to sign up to something like this. You could, for example, agree to the current terms (even the very confusing ones) and later find out that yes, someone else now owns all the rights on your image, and so you are in expensive breach of contract with another organisation, to whom you have sold exclusive print rights.

Agreeing to something so flawed and hoping that a loophole like this will never be exploited is naive.

We each had a lot of fun shooting on Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day, but you can bet your rent money that we won’t be submitting anything under these terms. I sincerely hope this gets straightened out for next year, because it’s an otherwise extremely cool event.

So where to go from here? We encourage the WPPD team to re-think the rules. The basic idea of WPPD is, in our opinion, both excellent and exciting. We think we should not go off on a “WPPD SUCKS!” campaign. While this year’s rules deserve to be scrapped, the event itself deserves to be celebrated and supported. If the rules don’t sit right with you, we encourage you to write a polite message to the WPPD team at the designated email address, support@pinholeday.org, and tell them that you’d like to see them changed for next year. Or, they could make the one possible good use of rule 18 (the rules are whatever we say they are) and retroactively change this year’s rules to something sane.

Nicolai Morrisson & Katie Cooke

UPDATE, 3 March 2007, 11:30pm GMT -5 (US EST)
We posted a copy of this to the f295 Pinhole Forum at the same time it was posted posted here (about 9 hours ago) as it seemed relevant. I just discovered that the thread has been deleted. It was located at f295 Pinhole Forum -> Thoughts and Observations: General Discussion -> Serious concerns about WPPD terms (last part now dead).

No word from the WPPD team yet.