I haven’t gotten a chance to exhibit them yet and I don’t know if I could credit them. I just collected a huge folder of photos as the disaster was unfolding, most of it was probably amateur shots, some were just stills from video cameras that had been left running but I might have used something taken by a professional photographer, I honestly don’t know.
Most of the phots were grainy, I wasn’t looking for high detail anyway. I was not using perfectly framed photos intended for an art gallery, I don’t think anyone took anything like that anyway, but it’s likely, almost certain, that some of the photos in my folder were taken by journalists.
I was a “failed artist” that had every reason to believe that all my past work had just been destroyed in storage and I started painting a series about the destruction of my home.
The point I was trying to make was that this guy is doing something pretty scummy. He’s in the actual art world, making money, and basically cloning other peoples work.
My problem is when this trickles down into shouting matches on places like DevArt or Instagram where people are accused of being thieves for doing the kind of referencing that has honestly happened for centuries. Hiring models is old but paying for reference is extremely modern and I don’t think we are working with a reasonable set of rules under current copyright laws, I think it currently fails both artists and models.
There are certainly working models getting ripped off but there is also a rush to extract “value” from every possible human interaction or exchange that is just unhealthy.
