 So welcome, everybody. In particular, welcome to those of you in the Harvard Law School class. Thanks for coming to the event. And welcome to the participants in all of the Copyright Act affiliated courses in the United States and in other countries. This is the first of two what we sometimes call special events in which all of the components of the Copyright Act network meet, meet either in physical space or online, to address a topic of common interest. Here's the context for the event today. As all of you know by now, scholars, legislators, and judges who work in the field of copyright law constantly make reference to the kinds of adjustments in the law that might foster artistic creativity, somewhat more precisely, foster artistic creativity and then make available to the world the fruits of that creativity. An important premise of all of those arguments is a conception of what artistic creativity entails. What shapes, motivates, and constrains artists? Unfortunately, rarely do the scholars, legislators, and judges who pursue these themes attend to the voices or experiences of actual artists to learn what creativity does in fact involve. Instead, usually the analysis proceeds on the basis of conventional, arguably outmoded narratives about art and creativity. So in an effort to mitigate this problem, in Copyright Acts, we attempt each year to present to the group a serious artist who can speak out of genuine experience about the issues that lawmakers so commonly take for granted. A premise of our approach to this issue is that creativity is different in different fields. There is no such thing as artistic creativity in general. Artistic creativity varies by the type of work and then varies within each field. So each year, we try to bring one or more artists to speak about the nature of his or her work, not just because it's interesting, but also because it enhances our understanding of how the law might more effectively be managed. So last year, as some of you know, Joshua Redman, a prominent and wonderful saxophone player, came and spoke about creativity in jazz. This year, the topic is photography, a theme that, as you know, has come up in many of the cases you've studied. So we have the great good fortune of having, as our presenter today, Abolardo Morel, who is a brilliant and justly famous photographer. Manifestations of his accomplishments include many prizes, including, for example, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a prize from the DeCorde of the Museum. Happens to be a few miles from my house. And most recently, the International Center for Photography, Infinity Prize. Other accomplishments include one man shows at major museums, including here in Boston, the Museum of Fine Arts, and in Chicago, the Art Institute. He also, somewhat to my surprise, has appreciation and renown within the world of lawyers. So recently, I learned through casual conversation about two such instances. So as all of you know by now, the most influential of the judges in the United States to have shaped the Fair Use Doctrine is Judge Laval. Now, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. By chance, we were talking the other day about what's going on in copyright. So I mentioned that Mr. Morel was going to be joining us. And he expressed extreme enthusiasm and explained that he and his wife had, a year ago, traveled to a phone from New York to San Francisco in order to participate in, I guess that's the right word, the live Camaro Obscura presentation in San Francisco. Another example is Charles Freed, former Solicitor General, now teaching, again, copyright, excuse me, contract law here, has one of Mr. Morel's photographs hanging in his home, in particular one of the interwoven leaves of books. So his accomplishments reach even into the upper reaches of the law. So here's how we're going to proceed. In just a minute, I'll start talking and turn down the lights again. And Mr. Morel give us a presentation of his work, including, as I'm told, some of his most recent work. That'll take 20, 25 minutes. Then we'll turn the lights back on. And Professor Jerry Frug, my longtime colleague, will begin a discussion of the issues raised by Mr. Morel's presentation. Professor Frug, unbeknownst to some of his colleagues, is a longtime collector of fine photography and an expert in it. So he will draw on his expertise to launch us into an exploration of the themes explicitly or implicitly posed by Mr. Morel's presentation. And then, roughly 2 thirds of the way through the session, I encourage you to ask questions. Really encourage you to ask questions. Both the members of the audience here and anyone watching the webcast live. So those of you watching the webcast should have already received instructions about how to present questions. Through a complicated digital chain, those questions will arrive on an iPad in front of me. And I will do my best to present them during the session. So please join me in welcoming Mr. Morel. My experiment is, I mean, I may have had a brush with a law over the past, but I've been trying to do this kind of thing. Oh, sorry. Yes, better? Anyway, I've known Jerry for a very long time and delighted to be here. I don't know how helpful I can be. Although I just made a very quick change. My first slide said camera, because that's what the target views. But then it dawned on me that I had changed to do in-camera. So I don't know, I'm a jokester. But it's a little bit more serious than that. My work, a lot of it, resides on the idea of being inside a camera and seeing how a camera looks at things. So this is a very sort of quick look at what I've been up to, including up to last week with some ideas behind it. And I hope you have questions about it. So again, it's a speeded up version of what I've been up to, but here it goes. 29 years ago, my wife and I had a baby. And the results, if you're married, you know what that means. I was at home a lot. And I began to photograph things around the house with a very meditative kind of look. I mean, I couldn't really leave the house that well. So I started looking at objects and sort of banal objects. But it dawned on me that, as I was looking at the pictures, that many of them had to do with water and optics. The idea of this glass full of wine reflecting or capturing that window on it. And struck me that the optics, the everyday optics, seemed really curious to me, including my own optics. And if you wear glasses, you get this picture. It's what we do every day. We kind of make up a new world. But anyway, this led me to, by the way, I was teaching at the Play School of Massachusetts College of Art at the time. And I had students like you, and I wanted to be excited about photography. So I made, well, here's some more background. But the idea of devices looking at the world, be it from a doer painting or a wood block, the way an artist translates a two-dimensional, a three-dimensional object onto a two-dimensional object, is still a problem for us to work out. And so that fascinated me. The idea of just how a photograph, a two-dimensional thing, can deal with this depth of the world. So I made this picture in 1991, mostly to show students the nature and magic of photography with a very rough thing. I mean, it's a camera. It's a Martini Rossi camera. I don't know if you're aware of that one, but it's as bad as it comes. I wanted to make a picture that looked, improvised, rough, but still show the beauty of how the slide-bulb enters that box upside down. And it becomes this gorgeous idea. Someone said, I think it was Edward Steichen, said photography was born perfect. And in some ways, it probably was. With even the clumsiest apparatus, you can get this beautiful idea of the idea of a picture. So this led me to Camera Obscurus. And essentially what that is is any small box or big room that's darkened, I mean, totally darkened, so all those shades will be darkened. If I put a whole looking out there, just a whole, that building would get projected on this wall upside down. It just happened. And again, just to be on point here, it's not copyrighted. That phenomenon, that physical phenomenon, no one invented. I like to say that it came with a place. Whoever, whatever the physics of it, small opening in a dark space, creates images. That eventually led to photography. Someone fixing that image. Anyway, I had heard about Camera Obscurus forever, but I'd never seen a photograph of the event, the thing. No one had made a picture of what it looks like, drawings and illustrations. So in 1991, I did such a thing. I put black glasses on my living room, put a small hall, and then images from across. So this is a very rough idea of what it looks like. This is the first Camera Obscurus picture I made in 1991. Inside our living room, the world came inside. It took me a whole summer to figure out the mechanics and the technical things. Like, for instance, this is an eight-hour exposure. Film, it's very slow. But I really felt like I had invented photography. I did. It's like no one had done this before. Again, that's your territory. So I feel a little possessive of it when I get emails all the time saying, oh, look at my Camera Obscurus work. I mean, you just feel a little dirty. Here's some others that I've made in the past, Times Square. So this is a little bit of a very speeded up version of it. So all this work was done a long time ago with film involving six to eight-hour exposures. Very neat way of approaching photography. That has changed. In 1993, I was looking at a book, this book, by El Greco. And I really loved the way that light was playing off the image. In fact, it felt like this is a pieta, that Christ and Mary were turning into negatives. It's very beautiful and weird. And I made a picture of it. And I thought, OK, I'll make more book pictures. And I ended up making hundreds. I remember friends calling me saying, what are you working on? And I say, I'm photographing books. They'd be like, oh, oh. Yeah, they just sound dull as hell. But of course, when you start looking and figure out that world and put your own soul into it, something else comes out. That's everything we know, mostly. I like the idea of that, one picture symbolizing something else or encompassing the idea of the weight of thought. Paper has always been really interesting to me, including books because it's symbolic paper. Then I started doing paper money. I don't know if I'm going to get in trouble for this, but here's a little sequence. $1, $5, $25. That hasn't come out yet, but it's a new one. $60, $40,000. Now, this is the good one, $7 million. Now, I really like the idea of photographing money because it's so charged with meaning from the lowest to the highest. I wanted to make pictures of money that made it look like just a thing, not a value. In fact, I'm trying to negotiate with the Fed to photograph $100 million now. And the last time I said, I wanted to run it by legal, which is the end of the world. That's it. So I don't have any hopes. But $100 million, I've seen it. It's quite a thing. This is not in my basement. This is the Federal Reserve in Chicago. In 2006, this man who lives in London who has a palazzo in Venice on the Grand Canal looking salute, he gave me a call and said, I've seen you work in London. And what if I fly you and your family here and you stay in my palazzo and do a picture from my room? And my line was going to be like, I have to be in Detroit that week. Yeah, of course. So this is the picture I made. At this point, I'm using color. The projection has actually been improved by just instead of a hole, I'm using something called a diopter, which can be made to focus at a certain distance. So I have several diopters that will say 12 feet. It's very sharp. So things have really changed dramatically with this camera obscura idea. And in fact, one of the things that I intentionally are doing is when people are sending me their JPEGs of their camera obscuras, I'm saying, OK, here is. I'm going to change it, basically, to get rid of these followers who I can't sue. I mean, obviously, maybe we'll talk later. So I'm constantly changing the idea of how this thing can be. Then in 2007, I went back, same building. It's like the Monet paintings of Cathedral. You go back, and it's a whole different thing. Then this man who owned the palazzo actually said, well, this is a kind of little painting. He actually was looking at a painting and said, I know the guy there. I know the guy who works there. He's like, what? So there. And we found them. And went to his place on the second floor. And I'm 100% convinced that Canoletto, who was sort of the great Venetian painter, made this painting from that place. Everything points to it. So I made my own picture. In this case, now I'm changing the technique a little more. I'm using a prism in front of a lens to make a right side up, which kind of gives it a different kind of reality. Something else I've been really involved in doing, including at Harvard here, at Yale, is making pictures of art. I love art so much that I want to make a contribution to the way we look at it, including asking very courageous curators to put a very expensive bust two inches away from a hopper. There were five curators around me kind of like this. But of course, I don't give a shit. I'm an artist. Anyway, it's not true. But I really wanted to create a kind of a photograph that had a whole new inventive way of how art can be seen. That's an idea I had. So that picture became this picture, where a Nettleman had an hopper becomes a Magritte or the Chirico. It's fun to break the boundaries and to make them beautiful too. Here's another one at the Yale Art Gallery. Now this comes to a closer thing here. With the Camera Obscure project, I still feel limited by the fact that I need a room to look at something. Well, I started looking at the history of photography, and I discovered all kinds of weird apparatus, including this thing. This is before the invention of photography. Artists used all kinds of devices to draw things from the world. In this case, this guy is in this weird tent with a periscope at the very top. And the world presumably comes down onto his drawing pad. So an image of that landscape actually could get projected on his pad so he could draw it. It was the rage. A lot of people did this, basically using a device to draw from the world. Eventually, that kind of drawing of the world led to a man in Fox Talbot and the Gare to think, well, why can't we keep that image, meaning, why can't we have photography? But before photography, many devices like this happened. So anyway, I decided to get my own. And I went to a California place that had a tent that had some of what I wanted, although some modifications. We made a hole at the top. This is a, sorry, I left a slide out. Anyway, inside the tent, it's a very long, big tripod holding a lens and a prism, like a periscope, which actually looks onto the world and projects the image on the ground, whatever ground that might be, sand, dirt, grass, you name it. So I really like the idea of making this thing portable. And in fact, I had a commission to photograph in West Texas at Big Bend National Park. So I started working on the idea of making a portable camera skier where the ground becomes the recipient of the image. So this is a little bit of our first trip in Texas. It was a pain in the ass. I mean, it's just a lot of weight, a lot of effort. But in some ways, I like the idea that it's like 19th century American photography, very much like this. Mules bringing cameras up, and I suppose I'm sitting at home in your pajamas doing Photoshop. So once we set that up, we took a look at this part of the landscape. And inside the tent is a camera photographing this thing. So this is what came out. Again, I feel like I had extended this idea of camera obscure into a new kind of territory where the ground itself is receiving an image from the outside. It felt very natural, very organic. And of course, as the ground changes, everything else changes. Here's one in Maine, Acadia National Park, with a lot of dead grass looking at that beautiful landscape. And this is the way it looked. So this is a photograph showing what the ground looked like with that projection. Went to New York on some rooftops, Madison Avenue, pebbles on this rooftop in New York. It feels like the end of New York, isn't it? I mean, very apocalyptic. Then I got on a rooftop looking at the bridge. So all that dirt and lines and all that, that's the roof surface contributing the patina of the image. Went to Italy, and this looks very funny. There were like 50 cops on the other side. We had permission. But this thing was looking at the baptistry, which to me is talking about copyright. Brunelleschi, famous Italian artist, made an experiment looking at that baptistry. It's a long, complicated way that he did it. But essentially, that day he invented perspective, at least in art. After his experiment, Western art changed, totally. And so I wanted to photograph that thing in my own way. So this is the baptistry with the surface of the pebbly surface, with a lot of tourists lining up. This is on the outskirts of Florence. Very much like painting, isn't it? I mean, I'm actually flirting, and I'll end with that. A few other pictures where painting has become an important reference. Yellowstone. This is William Henry Jackson, one of our great 19th century photographers, probably the first person to photograph all faithful. I think it was really the first photographer. And so it's a very famous site. I got permission. A lot of tourists were going, I don't know, you could camp here. Right? We know the president, you know? But I wanted to photograph something that has been so photographed. If you start counting how many pictures there are of all faithful, what, a billion? I mean, it's a lot. My feeling is that when I do something, I want to do something that has never been done before, as much as I can. So this is the picture that came out. It's almost like an attempt to try to bring back what has been dulled. I've been photographing paper, as you say. I mean, really interesting paper. And my family, this is a portrait of me. It's a silhouette. I've been buying a lot of 3 by 5 cards, thousands of them. My UPS guys constantly bring. So I'm building things out of paper. So that's me. It's my wife and me, my son, my daughter. I'm going to end with this, have a show at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in May. They commissioned me to make work in the winter. And what, winter? So I went to May in a lot with really cold temperatures, and I've made work. But I wanted to show you some of the show is inspired by a man who I really like, Wallace Stevens. And the idea of winter becoming the kind of thing you have to embody in order to know it. So the show is sort of driven by this man. But some of the people I've been looking at, a lot of times when I make new work, I look at hundreds of things. I want to get a taste of what's been done before, like this Seger's guy in a Dutch 17th century Japanese prince, maybe the best painting ever by Brogol. It's a harsh winter. They only got one fox. So the harshness of winter, I wanted to sort of drink a Rockwell Kent, Kiefer, German, and this beautiful wave. Neil Welver from Maine, Japanese print. Just to give you a sense of, obviously, artists like everybody else, either we grew up in a cave and we know nothing, and then we become pure geniuses. Oh, we look at everything. And we do look at everything. So that's part of the thing that we do, how to change it. That's the thing that I'm trying to do. This is a cliche there was a technique that was sort of invented in the 1850s by some French painters. That's why it's cliche there. Anyway, Corot and Millet and people like that had this idea that maybe instead of painting on canvas, they could paint on, they could take a piece of glass, darken it with ink, let it dry, and then with something sharp, make drawings on it. But then, this is the genius part, they would take this handmade negative and expose it to photographic paper. So the result is a photograph of that negative. It's a neat, neat thing. And then here's a Corot negative on the right and then the print that came out of it. It's a handmade negative. So I've been interested in that aspect of image making for a while. Here's some more. So the Museum of Modern Art in New York, they come up with these special books, like they only make 200 of them, I think, linking an artist with a writer. Anyway, I was linked with Oliver Sacks, who I admire very much. And his book has had to do with a lot with ferns and cycads and weird vegetation. So I decided to use cliche affairs, this is like four years ago, to make a kind of a collaborator with Oliver. So this is some of that. I invented cliche, I mean, ferns and cycads on the ink. And once it dried, then I made scans of them and these are large photographs now. Very almost not photographic, except in this case, there's a scan, that's photographic, scanning it. Okay, so for this show in Maine, I decided to make some cliche affairs addressing this winter. I made, this is three plates, that plate, second plate, third plate. So this is a thing that I just recently made, like last week, where I'm working on glass and I cannot draw or paint, but I have a sense of how to make shapes. So this is a 12 foot high piece, that's gonna be at the main show. This is three plates that I also made by scratching it over three days to make it kind of a landscape. This is the left, middle, and right. That's another 12 footer. And I wanna end with Basho, who's the famous haiku writer, famous Japanese writer. And I thought it had some relevance to copyright, two quotations. So I'm hoping that I've kept up with these dictums. Thank you. Did I go over time or good? You wanna get the lights? So one of the issues for me now is, I mean, I don't care, but some people ask me, like my dealer in New York, the guy who sells my pictures. They worry about things like, well, is this a photograph or what is this? So that's the market. Abe is no longer making typical photographs, even weird photographs, but now it's a whole new sense of art making. So anyway, that's just money. So Abe, it's amazing. It's really amazing how many ideas you are pursuing and have pursued. So the question is, so you're starting with the wine glass. You did a whole series of that. But then the camera sure, and keep going on, on, books, books, books. So how do these ideas come? Where do they come from? It's hard to answer. I can go halfway, maybe. I use cameras, so cameras suggest ways that the way it looks at things. So sometimes the idea of how it looks at things becomes a topic for a picture. But I remember someone once talking about ideas and where they come from. And the analogy was, there is a stream 100 feet below you of the unconscious. The stuff that's really, the stuff that really makes us who we are. We don't have access to it, but we can put down a string with a little cup, bring it down 100 feet, and grab a little from it, and occasionally get to see a little bit of it or something. That's sort of the way it feels to me. But you said in your talk that you're trying to see something different, saying something new. So there is, the stream is very powerful. All these photographs are all faithful. But yours don't look like any of them. So... Well, it's what Ezra Pound, sort of a controversial modernist poet, he said, make it new. And that's part of, who cares about that same old picture of all faithful? I mean, I should tell you that I'm a Cuban refugee. I came to this country in 62, sort of with nothing, and I'm not trying to make you cry or anything like that, but it's part of being a young refugee in this country. The idea of what I liked about the US was the ambition, the sense of ambition, and that things could happen. I grew up in New York. So I really liked being able to wow people. And maybe that's part of it. I'm not sure. One of the things is you see things differently. I mean, you're actually, you're looking for something to see. In the wine glass, in the camera obscures, in the books, people have taken photographs of books, they're taking photographs of the photographs you have of yourself and your family. You're looking for something. Yeah, because there's no choice. To me, if you wanna be an artist or a great lawyer or something, I mean, why just do the same old thing? I mean, I'm, I suppose it's part of immortality or something. You wanna leave something that will go, I don't know, in the books or something? The answer is I don't know, Jerry. Yeah, well, I don't know any of this either. But if you focus on the camera obscures, you said on the one hand, you invented camera obscures. On the other hand, the camera obscures goes way back into history. And the other, then third, you said, all these people are now doing camera obscures. So there's the question of your relationship to your predecessors and the future, other people's relationship to you. Yes, exactly. You seem divided about all of that. I am conflicted. I mean, first of all, camera obscure, whatever that effect is, was born totally year zero. I mean, it was just, it was happened in a cave with limestone in the back, a small ol' crack on the cave. Buffalo was upside down on those caves. I'm certain of it. It was born like that. I don't feel like I own the technique, but I do feel like the idea of picturing it was mine. The idea of picturing it was yours. Yes. And why isn't it a compliment that other people are trying to do that? Because sometimes the art world is kind of weird. I mean, the Whitney Biennial, which is very hip thing. Some young person decided to do an installation of a camera obscura there. Zero reference to what I've done, which is exactly what I've done for, anyway, maybe I'm better. It's just the idea that suddenly the art world has really short memory, and somehow the accomplishments of what I've worked really hard to do are now I keep being asked exactly how big is the lens, and where'd you buy the lens, and how long is the exposure? I mean, they want the recipe. If they had told you, if they had said in this exhibit, Abe Morel was the one who taught me how to do this by just looking at it. I would feel better. You'd feel better, but not good enough. I don't know better. My answer is that I'm just gonna make new stuff that's gonna be harder to do. That's the other thing. Your own camera scars change over time. Exactly, exactly. So I mean, it's not as if you have some. No, no, it's just, it's the, it's the whiny me, thinking that way. You, I mean, I'm not gonna be able to sue them, right? No. Well, I mean, we leave that question to people out here. I don't wanna opine on that. No, I don't wanna be part of this thing. No, I did it first. No, I mean, it just feels a little weird to not even be sort of mentioned in the same sentence that this grew out of that. So a number of times in the presentation, you refer to artists, painters and whatnot. And indeed would photograph in museums and a lot more than what you showed and the gardener and whatnot. Very inventively, are you reluctant to photograph living artists? I mean, is there some block for you so that are you stopping at something that you think is no longer? No, no, that's a very good question. Maybe I have this feeling of maybe that's a line I'm not gonna cross. But that's a good point because everybody would photograph is dead. That's a good point. I do like Alex Katz a lot. He's alive, I think. So I wanted to feel like it's there's enough time that's come by where everyone knows what that hopper looks like. Everyone knows what that Jasper John looks like and then my version of it. So then- Jasper John's is still alive. Oh yeah. Yeah, sorry. Sorry. So- Yeah, but it's a very good point. I think that I do wanna feel like I'm thinking from the top. I'm wondering whether it's some implicit idea of copyright protection that, in other words, not so much the law, right? Cause you wouldn't know what the law was, but some feeling that you're invading some living person's space. And it's all right for Hopper cause he doesn't care anymore. The state does. Yeah, the state does. No, that's a good point. One of the things I did not show was I've made a Alice in Wonderland version, the first book. A wonderful, wonderful thing. Anyway, when I started making pictures of Alice, I started doing cutouts from the original tenial illustrations. So I scanned them very high in and had my sister make cardboard versions of Alice and the rabbit. And then the publisher gave me a call saying, wait a minute, we should look into this. Are we breaking some kind of thing by using tenials who died many hundreds of years ago? But it was, they consulted with a lawyer. It was fine. But there was a question of, and of course what I did with the Alice thing was very different from Lewis Carroll. But I am in the process of doing the next book through the looking glass and that will come up again. The question about control versus surprise. So if you believe the self descriptions of some photographers, for example, maybe the extreme here with the Ansel Adams, everything seems planned, the scenes, usually natural scenes you photographs, the setup, the dark room, everything is planned. When you select a spot, for example, in Texas, put your tent and a zone to point the prism or image at and the texture of the ground, how much of it are you planning and how much of it is surprise? A lot of it is surprise because I don't know how the ground is gonna interact with the image. No, it's two or three things to set. The result is usually very surprising. And I'm fine with that, even though I'm a very controlled kind of guy. I'm often surprised. So does that mean that presumably they're bad surprises as well as good surprises? Yeah. I'm so sorry. Does that mean that like modern digital photograph photographers, you throw away a lot of things? Yeah, I should also say that in the evolution of my work, for the last six, seven years now, I use only digital technology. So what used to be five, six hours long exposures is now in the realm of two to five minutes. So that all faithful picture could only happen with a digital technology because you could make a short exposure. So now it's a laptop inside a tent and making a picture and going, I don't like that so much. So you can actually, I have a lot more control now, even though it's digital, but I throw less and less out these days. When I was young, I threw a lot out. But now it feels like I know where to put myself to look at that in this setting. Maybe it's because I'm 66 and I have less time. I can't afford to say, oh, whatever. I'm pretty determined to get the right location and review. So I'm batting more than 500. I mean, you save more than 50% of your images. Yeah. Okay, a loosely related question goes out of that. It's that many of the techniques that you've wonderfully described here are recapturing as you emphasized for different purposes, old techniques. Until you explained how you were generating the images themselves, one might get the impression that you are intentionally eschewing modern digital techniques for an older, I think you would say, once grounded or rich set of ways of generating images. But it seems, in my right, that turns out to be wrong. You're actually happy to use the most modern digital. Absolutely. Yeah, now I'm interested in working really hard like the old-fashioned people. Not in my pajamas in front of the computer, but then using the latest technology and the sharpest lenses. So I think that's when someone is who makes a little bit modern. I've been in talks where I declare myself or use digital technology and I've heard booze in the past because there are some purists who think, well, no, you really ought to be using the old-fashioned wet process and all that. And that's just, I'm interested in making images, not necessarily following the orders of the old guard. Although the old stuff is quite rich with potential. So I'm trying to do it. I mean, I have the most expensive digital camera ever made. It has to be, because it's just I want it to be really good. And the best lenses, yet when I'm in the tent in San Francisco and it's blowing and you feel like, oh, in the Grand Canyon, we've been on the Grand Canyon funky to be on that edge and the wind is blowing and it feels really primitive. But I sort of like that, straddling both worlds. Your silver prints, your black and white prints are incredibly beautiful and this was no accident. This is the old guard. This is not at all, on that point, I don't care whether you're a new worker's photography or not actually, as a collector, we're happy that you're pushing the medium. Tell you a dealer. So what I was gonna say is you took a lot of chances not only in digital, but to go to color from black and white and cliche vera and all that. So it's not just the topics, the subject matter. Right, right. And I just think that sometimes the market makes, especially if you succeed really young, which I didn't, I think I was 40 something when I saw my first picture, but sometimes young people getting success. There's a certain tendency to, for the art world to say, I like what you're doing here is good. Just keep that going because it's selling. And sometimes there's a certain kind of limitation of ambition and whatever. So I've always been afraid of that too. Somebody's saying, no, this is, so I've always sort of felt free to do whatever and my dealers in the past have been okay with it. So I'm not feeling like I owe the world anything. I do something and if it happens to work, it's fine. But it is dangerous to say, you know, those flower pictures, they're good. Especially the pink ones, you know. So I have one more question for now anyway. This quotation that you put up right at the end. Yeah, I love that quotation. It's what I live for. So here's their question. Many, not all, accounts of the nature of artistic evolution in China would disagree with this. It'd say that a great artist does walk in the footsteps of the masters. And while it would be a nice analogy, while seeking the same end, walk in the same footsteps, fidelity to the craft and tradition, and then gently move a modest distance out of the path. You disagree with that? Well, actually, this makes sense to someone who's been at it for a bit. When I started, I wanted to be like Dionne Arbus and Robert Frank and Cardia Brisson. All my heroes, I just wanted to make pictures like them. At some point though, it became clear that I wasn't going to become as good as they were. And that's when it felt like, okay, you know, this is, I need to depart from that apprenticeship, which is important, you know. It's really important to pay the dues, but if you stay like that, then you're gonna be sort of known as the school of Raphael. Not Raphael. Come on, yes. Okay, hi. So you talked a lot about the camera obscura technique and how you feel you have some ownership over translating that into photography. So I was just wondering, we've talked a lot about theories that infiltrate into copyright law that we can apply to copyright. So you spoke a little bit about how it seems like you feel maybe some of your personality comes out through that technique and that you would like the attribution of the other artists who use the technique. But do you also feel that some of the work you put into it, it seems like it was really a lot of trial and error in the beginning, covering a whole room in sheeting and getting the image right in the eight hour exposure. So do you think that plays any role in it, the amount of work you expended to create those images? At the end it says I love doing it. So I'm not gonna feel like I worked really hard and you're ripping me off. I mean, no, it took me all that work to end up with what I ended up doing. So that's experience and all that. So it's a small irritation when you see somebody kind of calling me and saying exactly what opening on the lens and exactly where did you get the tent and people who don't want to work very hard. I'm not sure I'm answering your question but I don't mind all the work that I put into it. Sorry. I mean, it's a little, it's a little true. I mean, I remember hours and hours talking to physicists here at Harvard talk about light and lenses and I mean, a lot of trial and error and experimenting and getting this lab in upstate New York to grind me certain lenses. I mean, it's a lot of work. But I'm not sure in this realm one could say, well, I put a lot of work into it and so therefore, how do you tell somebody to do the same amount of work when it's already out? Difficult. To me, anyway. So natural follow up on this comes from a person who's watching the webcast, Sean Federolf. From where? I don't know, to be honest. It would be nice to know. It could be quiet. I hope not Cuba. Wait a minute, why do you hope not Cuba? No, no, just. So Sean asks, what protections would you like or expect to have on your artistic work and why? In other words, if you, I say in other words, I'm gonna put some words into Sean's mouth here. If you had a free hand in crafting a set of restrictions on what other people could do with your stuff, what would that be? Well, typically when a picture, I mean, if I'm on the internet and you know, people can just put all clowns flying and which I don't think I can control but if somebody's using a publication of mine, a picture and then they use it for an ad or they crop it or things like that are very restrictive. I mean, they have to agree that they will not change the nature of the image. So that kind of thing. Cropping is really bad. So no verbatim reproduction on the internet and no modifications, because that is as you say, sounds like it even worse than verbatim reproduction is modifying the image as it appears. Absolutely. Actually, I should tell you, the Smithsonian, that's a reputable place. They've bought some of my pictures in the past. Years and years ago, I was going through the internet and I saw a little ad from the Smithsonian selling, this is a picture that they bought of mine, a camera obscura picture, selling that image but printed on canvas, even more cheesy. But and they had 100 to sell. I mean, it was just outrageous. It's like, I mean, that was totally illegal but they felt like they could somehow make money by selling a picture that they have of their own and make it into a kind of a sexy canvas thing. And of course, I call them in this, oh, mistake or something, but that was freaky. Because I thought, this can't be legal. You're completely right, totally illegal. Oh, okay. Okay, good, good paranoid. Other question. Very well established. Somebody used your work in a similar way, would you be all honored, would it bother you a little bit or, I guess, what? Like do to my work what I did to Hopper. Yeah, exactly, yeah, exactly. I don't care. In fact, recently there was somebody on the internet, there was a solar eclipse recently somewhere. Anyway, I have a picture of a solar eclipse on the ground. I like a lot. This guy projected a solar eclipse on one of my pictures. I loved it because I clearly, it was fine. So no, I don't have an issue with people messing with my work. It's sort of an honor in some ways. But I hope that Hopper would have gotten a cake out of this picture some day. Yes. I don't have a domain such that anybody, eventually anybody will be able to use it in whatever way they want. Maybe for profit, maybe for something cheesy or something that you don't prove. I don't think I can. They'll be at some point a state of my work that will control the usage of, I'm pretty sure that that exists. It does. So I don't think that I will be exposed like that if we have the right lawyers, you know. But no, no, I wouldn't, no, there will be some controls. In fact, if you wanna use a famous Robert Frank picture for something, oh my God, it's impossible. It's totally impossible. That will not let you do it. In fact, sometimes it's even too harsh. The estates become way too limiting, even for things that are just a reproduction. So I don't know, maybe artists are more paranoid, but it's the case on the other end of it. Will you give instructions in whatever document do you employ to create the estate? Will you try to guide what happens to yourself after you die? Sort of. I have an appointment sometime to deal with that. But it's interesting now, you know, the old technology was a negative, which I have them still, now they're files. And additions exist, you know, when you sell a photograph through my dealer, they're addition of 10. But you know, if I make the 11th picture, it's a no, no. But things like that really have to be controlled so that it's not suddenly, people like Ansel Adams did not have additions so that the famous ones, they've sold 20,000. So now the market is, they wanted to be limited. So it has consideration about that, it exists. Sorry, you had a question. It sounds like some types of modifications of your work you're okay with and other kinds you would object to. So for example, the projecting the solar eclipse is okay, but cropping and printing on canvas are not okay. I'm just wondering how you distinguish what's important to you, does it matter whether the person who's modifying your work does something creative to it, whether you like the thing that they create using your work? Yeah, no, I should change. The guy who took the solar eclipse, he's cropped by it. I mean, I don't care when creative means are used with a picture of mine, but if it's, here is the work of our Lord of Morel and so that it's cropped. I mean, when it's meant to show what my work is, as opposed to we're having fun with it. So, but that's a very funny middle there. I don't know how much control I have over that. But typically, if it's for reproduction, a book or an article or the New York Times wants to use it, in the back says, no cropping. But of course people do that all the time and do I want to spend $50,000 to sue them? No, probably not. Yes. Hang on one second so you can get the microphone. How much do you think about copyright at all during the creative process, whether it be maybe some kind of best practices among photographers, like don't upload your work on the internet or something like that? I don't know what best practices is in the biography of that. Or other future artists being inspired by your work. Does any of these, I guess, concerns that were voiced in the class come up to you when you're creating the work, not after the work has been created? I don't think about it at all. I mean, I think the artists self-regulate a little bit and we hope that people have a history foundation. Like for instance, there's a very famous photograph of a pepper by Edward Weston. I think the last time I saw it, it was close to a million dollars, you know, a little thing like that. Anybody can make a picture of a pepper, even in his style. But I don't think you can copyright that. I mean, you can't. Hopefully people will say, oh, that's Edward Weston's pepper. So it's understood that if you make that picture, you're kind of, it's not original. You know what I mean? There's a certain kind of understanding that it's a copy of a thing, but it's not like on paper, written somewhere. Sherry Levine, do you know who she is? Sherry Levine is a very famous contemporary artist. Anybody know who she is? She, conceptually, she took a Walker Evans photograph. Walker is one of our great artists. An eight by 10 photograph and photographed it, right? Printed it. And the work is now called Sherry Levine After Walker Evans. It's bullshit, but, and it's in museums now, the Sherry Levine version. To prove a point that photography is reproducible and many versions could exist. But the Sherry Levine Walker Evans doesn't look like Walker Evans. You wouldn't mistake them. No, no, it's a copy of the print. No, they're not as good because they're not as sharp. But still, that's how far some people may go to prove the point that, oh, photography is reproducible, but Sherry Levine's pictures sell for thousands of dollars. That's an interesting point. I'm glad I'm not buying those Sherry Levines from museums, but you hope that museums are saying, well, this is bullshit. Or is it? So I would change course slightly here. Here's another question from one of the participants online, Paul Goh, and I don't know where he's located. Goh? We can find out. It seems your photographs tend to have a story behind them. How important is the story to the photograph? And I suppose by story one could mean either the narrative of how it came to be, which you've provided us, or in a more conventional sense, the story that the final image, however it came to be, is conveying. Well, I think it's important to convey a sense of how an idea forms into something. So that's the way I like to talk about my pictures, not like, well, my sister bought this, and it's typically not about that, but how ideas become concrete. So telling that aspect of how a picture gets made is important to me, you know, like the paper images. The fact that that's me and my family, it's important because it's like, I mean, I love them. So that's wanted to do something different, but it comes out of some of the idea of family. So. So here's a follow-up question. You know how sometimes you go to an exhibit, say Monet, no, haystacks, be on the wall, and the plaque in the museum will give an explanation of where Monet was and what he did, and it's a explanatory narrative of the creation of the image. When your work is shown at the MFA, are there such plaques? Do you provide that ever for mission? No. No, but interesting question. I'm gonna be an artist in residence. I've got this gig in Monet's garden in June. So I'm gonna be bringing my tent, and a cliche affairs to Monet's garden. So those pictures may have that reference, Abe visits Monet's place, and this is where Monet made that painting. So it's interesting you ask, because I think that that will be important. I mean, I love Monet, and I love the pure vision of his work. So it's very much of a going to Mecca, for me, very important that that be part of it. One of the common things of your work for me is they're all beautiful, incredibly beautiful. Thank you. And that is not a story. That's an old-fashioned word these days. I know, but you used it yourself. I love beautiful. But you know, when I went to graduate school, it's like, mm, beautiful, mm, mm. But what I'm saying about it, it's not about the story. It's about the image. It's about the end of the image. Every once in a while, you said, like, with the money, that it was important that you have the money itself. That's why you want $100 million. Yeah. So that's a story thing, but it's unusual. It is unusual. It is unusual. Although the $100 million, because I was this close to getting it. Not getting the money, but getting the view of it. And it was just like this class calls us, well, we ran it by legal, and now they don't. Here is something that pertains. The federal reserve in an American city, Miss City, I feel like a lawyer now, said, will you be selling this image? We'd be selling the picture you'd take of $100 million. And I said, yeah, that's how artists live, from Monet to now. He says, well, we have a problem. People making money off a federal property? I don't know what the thing is. But it was like, if you don't sell it, it's fine. But suddenly, if it's a commercial thing, then we can't say yes. So that was, I mean, obviously, I couldn't argue. I just ran it, but I couldn't really argue with them about that. I just find that interesting that if I didn't sell it, it would be OK. So I don't know. Anyone who wants to go to Atlanta? Yes, that was really upset. $100 million is a beautiful, beautiful object. It's gorgeous. Sorry. Thank you for being with us. You spoke about not wanting to let the market dictate the kind of work that you make. Are there instances, aside from, say, your trip to Venice where your interaction with your buying public actually encourages you to be creative or leads you to think in a new way about your work? Yeah. I mean, in fact, this man in Venice who's very pushy. It was one time when I was making the picture in his bedroom. And again, very pushy guy. And I'm focusing and arranging it. And at one point, he says to me, I remember this, because I turned red. He said, wouldn't it be better if you put, like, he actually started suggesting how the picture should be made. And I was like, I tell you what, I'll be the artist. You'll be the rich guy. It was like that. It was like this never. I mean, it's like, how dare you even? Wouldn't it be better if, I mean, that alone just, anyway, he got it. Yes. I thank you for being with us. I had a question about what influenced and motivated and allowed you to become an artist and also continue creating art. Because the answer to this kind of shapes, I think, what we think copyright law should be. So the fact that copyright law offers you some protections allows you to sell your work. Do you think that's enabled you to continue to be an artist and be creative? Or would you have been able to do that, even without those protections? So kind of just like if you had a nine to five job, and then would you have continued to be able to make as much art and be as creative on the side? No, art has really kind of opened a way of being happy and making a living. But number one is happy, I think, for me. So yeah, the freedom is important, I think, that I'm guaranteed. But I always tell my students when I talk, if you think money first, it's going to kill you. It's just going to kill it. Because it sets a certain process in your DNA that becomes kind of infected. So money is not nothing. But it's like it can't be a driving force. Because again, it just aligns your army in a certain way. And it wants to do a certain thing because of that. Now I've been lucky that I actually make a living being an artist. And I get to do what I want, and that's unusual. I went to Bowdoin College as a refugee, not really speaking English at all. I mean, they took a chance on me, a big chance. And I did not do well in physics and math. And I took a photography course. And it was like, this is what I want to do forever. It was clear. I was lucky to find a thing, maybe like you guys have. And then this is a freedom and potential really came about. Yes? Hi. Thank you for being with us today. I wanted to know how do you decide what to photograph where, like, what's important to you? And then the second part is, what haven't you photographed, or what location that you would wish to that you aspire to? Yeah. I have a nice big studio now, and I sit. And I listen to Salsa and Wagner. I listen to everything. And I sit. And I start thinking. Then I think, hmm, that paper, I don't know where it comes from. But I just kind of imagine things. I'm going to India with my wife next winter. So I really dined to go to India because I just know that it's a hoot in India. They have the tent chaos and chaos together. It could be really wonderful. And then the Monet thing really sounds interesting because I want to make those cliche bears. I don't know how they're going to look at this, but I want to take flower juices and put them on the glass. I mean, I want to get Monet on the glass. So that's going to be really interesting. How to make a kind of a transition from a real thing to that. So India and France. But you suggest another place? Ultimately, though, I'm best when I'm at home with a desk like that and stuff on the table. That's really how invention really happens. For me, that's the best. So time has expired, and that actually seems a great place to stop. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.