Two men fill a briefcase with bottles of vodka as people queue to buy alcohol from a state store.
Gorbachev tried to ban it. Yeltsin enthusiastically endorsed it. This week President Dmitri Medvedev becomes the latest Russian leader to wrestle with his country’s age-old relationship with vodka: from September 1st it will be illegal for Moscow stores to sell hard liquor between 10pm and 10am.
Last year Medvedev declared himself shocked – although surely not surprised – at the scale of Russian alcohol consumption, and began a series of steps to curb a national habit that kills some half million people a year. He is unlikely to succeed; apart from anything else, history is against him. In 986 the the ruler of Kievan Rus Grand Prince Vladimir chose Christianity over Islam as the official religion of the fledgling Russian state. His reason? “Drinking is the joy of Russia. We cannot do without it.”
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There are certain elements every good spy story must contain. Espionage, obviously. Russians, preferably, since we need villains and everyone knows that the Russkies are the Bad Guys. Sex too: all code-breaking and no jollies makes for a very dull read. And of course, a copyright fight. Huh?
When 10 Russian spies were arrested in the US and subsequently deported to the motherland in the biggest spy swap since the cold war, photo editors everywhere were delighted to discover that one was more Anya Amasova than Rosa Klebb. Pretty much forgetting the other 9 less photogenic spooks, the western media homed in on 28 year old Anna Chapman: cue reams of breathless copy from the “gorgeous, pouting, sultry, femme fatale bombshell” school of journalism.
So it was a major disappointment to the panting hacks when Anna and her colleagues disappeared from view on their return to Russia: word was that they were holed up in a Moscow safe house discussing their futures with their employers at the SVR foreign intelligence service. The only news was of a meeting with Russia’s No. 1 former spook, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, when the entire company entertained themselves singing Soviet patriotic songs.
But now relief is at hand: Anna is back with a bang. For having been debriefed – so to speak – Anna did what any self-respecting spook craving a low profile would do: she posed in a series of revealing photographs with a Kremlin backdrop for a Russian magazine.
“None of this must leak”, Anna is claimed to have instructed during the photo session, shortly before the photos leaked onto..her own Facebook page. Naturally they were almost instantly redistributed around the web, and also popped up in the following day’s Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper.
The magazine that arranged the shoot, Zhara or Heat, are not amused at seeing their world exclusive wrecked by the talent. After all, if you can’t trust one of your own spies to keep a secret, who can you trust?
“Our lawyers have already prepared a lawsuit against Chapman over the internet publication of photographs of her that were taken by our publisher and thus are our intellectual property,” Heat’s chief editor Maksim Korshunov has told Interfax news agency. The magazine intends to sue Chapman for $32,000 and Komsomolskaya Pravda for $3,200, and will file suit early this week, says a legal spokesman.
The affair has thrust the gorgeous, pouting, etc Anna back into the western media spotlight: cue lots more breathless rewrites of the even more breathless hackery in the Russian press. In Heat’s own words: “Our employees are at a loss for words to explain how beautiful and erotic the photo shoot turned out.”
Of course it’s good to see the mainstream media take such a keen interest in an issue as dry as photographic copyright infringement, but despite all the excitement it seems very unlikely that Heat will be suing the Russian Prime Minister’s erstwhile singing partner. Rather obviously Anna is not without influence, and the $32,000 prize hardly seems worth the potential risks involved.
Heat needn’t lose their day in court though. In a notable irony failure, the western media have been enthusiastically republishing Heat’s photographs, and it’s doubtful whether any permission has been sought. The photos were shot on July 25th and US copyright law allows a 90 day window for material to be registered as unpublished. So Zhara’s lawyers still have several weeks in which they could register the images, then file suit against any US media outlets who’ve used the photos at up to $150,000 per infringement. And it’s not just the US media: Britain’s Daily Mail, for example, are clearly huge fans of Anna.
Given the exclusive nature of the material and its syndication potential – at least part proven by its use by other publishers – Heat could probably make a reasonable case for a substantial loss of earnings. And it would be difficult for those being sued to claim they didn’t realise that use of the pictures would be an infringement since that’s the central point of the stories they’ve been running.
It would be ironic if a Russian magazine were to sue western publishers for hijacking photographs of a Russian spy, but the opportunity is there. And it’s got to be a safer bet than suing a member of the Russian intelligence services.
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Perhaps it’s the influence of the forthcoming annual south of France grumble-fest, but the web has recently been awash with discussion of one of photography’s hardiest perennials: is photojournalism dead or merely in a coma? And if the latter how can it be resuscitated?
The most dramatic contribution came from NB Pictures director Neil Burgess on the Editorial Photographers UK website, where he announced: “Photojournalism: time of death 11.12 GMT August 2010”. Presumably he sent a memo to the photographers he represents before he let rip at EPUK.
Burgess’ article attracted a lot of attention. So much so that the London Photographic Association, in an audacious piece of grave-robbing, heisted the piece from EPUK, re-branded it as their own, and sent out a blizzard of tweets and press releases announcing their new exclusive. M’Learned Friends are now involved: hopefully EPUK’s lawyers will appreciate the post-modernist irony of an organisation that purports to support photographers stealing an article about the death of photojournalism from a website run by photographers.
Co-incidentally, and within hours of the Burgess article, Black Star’s blog published a piece by Jim Pickerell that reached almost the exact opposite conclusions to Burgess. In Pickerell’s view photojournalism is undergoing a revival through video and multimedia. However he provided nothing to support his thesis, and there’s considerable evidence to the contrary. Photographers and publishers have been experimenting with multi-media and video for some years: but circulations continue to plummet, and titles continue to close.
Paul Melcher’s usually grumpy Thoughts Of A Bohemian also saw grounds for optimism, but from a different direction: photographers and agents as self-publishers. Melcher’s arguments – essentially that people will pay for quality – are attractive, but rest on foundations that are at best unproven. And his sole example of an agency – Wireimage – successfully selling images to consumers is a poor choice. Wireimage specialise in red carpet celebrity and paparazzi material, for which there is an obvious consumer market. There’s no evidence of a similar consumer market for serious photojournalism: if anything quite the opposite.
Meanwhile Gerald Holubwicz has been publishing an excellent and growing series of 30 minute video interviews on the state of photojournalism: so far there’s Polaris Images’ JP Pappis, Magnum’s Mark Lubell, Melcher [again] and Vll’s Stephen Mayes. They’re all worth a look, but it’s Mayes who’s the most illuminating:
Vll have clearly put a lot of thought into their survival strategy, and like Melcher they view self-publishing as a key part of that strategy. Even so Mayes struggles to circumnavigate the very obvious elephant in the room: that photojournalism has historically been consumed as part of a larger package, and that Vll as publishers are unbundling that package when, in his own words, “there’s no history of people paying for news, and no evidence that they will do so”.
Despite their many differences all the articles and interviews do however have one interesting thing in common: none are the thoughts of working photographers. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, but it is more than a little odd that such a debate should be taking place between industry agents and observers, while excluding the actual practitioners. This is one occasion when it might be more appropriate to talk to the monkeys than the organ grinders.
