Nearly three years ago, I was sat in the pub with a friend and they went to the toilet. I was fiddling with my camera, taking photos of this, that and the other. The candle looked pretty cool, so I took a quick shot of it.
You can imagine my surprise when I was looking at an artist’s website, reached the bottom of the page, and saw my own photo staring back at me.
Joel Robert Harris calls this piece “Entering The Light”. He says:
> “Am I living in the light? Or are there fears, trauma, addictions, emotional scars, unhealed wounds ….hiding in the shadows? When the light of my awareness, or my consciousness, enters the darkness, everything hiding in the shadows comes into the light. It is with the light of my presence that I am able to dissolve fear, heal, and move beyond pain….As Mankind moves into the light, we heal ourselves, the world, and we create a reality based on love and compassion..”
I think that what he *meant* to say was:
> “I found a photo on the web and thought it looked quite nice, so I loaded it into photoshop, applied a few filters to make it look like I painted it, and then claimed it as my own.”
(Also worth a chuckle: on his homepage he has the tagline “art is creation”. Riiiiight.)
12 replies on “Artists are pretentious”
Well, he doesn’t specify whose creation, and it is a damn good photo. I am quite appalled by his outrageous cheek, though – I wonder who took the rest of his pictures for him? Have you contacted him at all to ask for your share (i.e. 100%) of the proceeds?
I strongly doubt that there are any proceeds. He’s not a very good artist.
Feel free to contact him undercover and find out how much he is selling it for though.
Woah the cheek!
Karen are you going undercover or I am?
.. hears Mission Impossible music in background ….
Help yourself, Ad. I’ll provide back up if things get sticky. Should we synchronise watches?
I favour the approach of going round there and shoving his paintbrushes up his … palette. As it were.
Well, what I mean is: you or Karen can do it. I am a pacifist. And a coward.
We’ll do it from behind our keyboards.
But how did you ever FIND it?
Sheer chance. The artist’s website was on the front page of reddit today. Leaves me wondering if any of my other photographs have been used in this way.
We’ll do it from behind our keyboards.
Will we shield our monitors with our bodies? Yay, we’re 21st Century Superheroes. Bagsy I be the one who turns invisible.
Well, he has printed it out really really big, and erm, well that is really poor isn’t it.
Perhaps you could find his studio, and take his painting and claim it as your own. if he complains, explain that you thought it would be okay as he stole your image 🙂
Oh oh oh I forgot about this.. must email him 😉
I’m sure loads of (y)our pictues are used like this. The amount of people I found hotlinking (i.e. the stupid ones) means there are def loads of slightly less stupid people who just download the image. I found my images all over forums.
And I can guarantee you because of google images, your pics have been used in 1000 corporate powerpoint presenations too.
I’ve had two people ask to use my images (oddly the same image) and was more than happy to let them do it. Just asking is enough.
Amusingly crappy-artisit-dude has this under your picture
“photo credit: source image for this painting came from google photos. attempting to locate photographer, original painting not for sale)”
Which shows he obviosuly doesn’t know how google images works … you know the way you click on an image and it shows you the original image on the original site. Somethign so obvious, you have to be either blind or stupid not to find the original source.