Eliot Porter, Big Sur, and iconic images:
At what point does a copy of a famous image become visual plagiarism? Or does it?
posted 6-25-2011 - 6:45 pm

 
There are some images that make such a deep impression on us that they stay with us for the rest of our lives. Often, that persistent image may be of a historical event or where we were and what we saw at that moment. If you’re old enough, you probably remember where you were when you learned that JFK or Martin Luther King was shot, when Nixon resigned, when men walked on the moon, when the twin towers came crashing down in New York, or when the Challenger or Columbia space shuttles exploded. In every one of those instances, I have a specific image of the place that I was in and what my surroundings were like – a Policywonk's-eye view, if you will – and when I recall one of those events, it’s always the same image that comes to my mind’s eye first, unbidden.

An image can also become fixed in the mind because of the meaning it has to you personally. But sometimes, an image sticks with you simply because it so accurately sums up precisely what it represents that it becomes the definitive image for thousands, if not millions or billions, of people.

So it is for me with a photo of the Big Sur coastline by the late Eliot Porter: Mist on Coast, Big Sur, California, September 25, 1975. It is a view of the ragged, stepped coastline iced with layers of fog, looking south, as if pulled out of time, and it has become the definitive image of Big Sur, iconic because it sums up in a way that words fail the very essence of the place. From the very first moment I saw it, I fell in love with that image, both stark and soft, with its power and its subtlety, and with the place it represented. It conveyed meaning in ways that I cannot define and became indelible in my mind. There was something about it that simply pulled at me. It continues to do so even today.

It also bugs me when I see that someone else has copied Porter’s image and presents it as his own. Particularly as I’m sensitive to intellectual property issues because as a writer I hope to protect my own work and livelihood, and copyright violations or plagiarism piss me off. But I’ll get to all that in a moment.

Porter, who died in 1990, left most of his work, including the shot of Big Sur, to the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. It is my understanding that the museum now owns the rights to the photos that Porter bequeathed to the museum, including this particular image of Big Sur, but I could be wrong.

There’s good reason for me to remember that image: it hung on my dining room wall in the first apartment I had as a grown woman, out of school and working, the first place that I really made my own after my separation and divorce. I was several years out of graduate school and a working journalist, with a minor in photography and a growing regret that making a living with the written word would command more and more of my time, leaving very little time for photography and other talents. I knew I’d have to make that choice if I was to build a career. Yet every time I looked at the poster of that perfect image, it summed up for me exactly what I wanted to be able to do with my own photography, and everything that I was letting go of in order to make a life as a journalist – one who was also a single woman with no other means of support, making her way in a profession that was, at the time, largely male. Photography was one of many things that got dropped by the wayside back then, and Porter’s image was a visible reminder.

It also encapsulated for me everything that I knew about coastal California at that point. Having grown up the daughter of an architect, I read old copies of the Sweet’s Catalog as a child and issues of Architectural Record (the one that architects read, not Architectural Digest, the popular magazine sold on newsstands), particularly the annual issue on houses and apartments. That issue was my favorite. From these, random copies of Sunset magazine, and what I learned of Ansel Adams’s work over the years, my mental picture of coastal California was of architect-designed homes sparsely dotted among secluded redwoods like tall treehouses in the modernist style, with clean lines, sleek metal, beautifully grained wood interiors, and lots of glass that eliminated the barrier between outside and in. The kind of house that I wanted to live in someday and hoped my mother would design for me, but that I have never been able to obtain. It’s no surprise, then, that when I first saw Porter’s photograph of Big Sur, my heart rushed to embrace it. It has so many layers of meaning for me.

This is an image that deserves to be seen full size rather than on a small screen, printed with care on highly silvered paper that allows the luminous detail to come through, and viewed up close, so that you can clearly see where the mist lets go and sharpness takes over. It’s a color shot, but the mist has so muted the color that it has the same impact as a black and white shot, the same ability to command your attention and not let you be distracted by hues. It’s an image that I admire as much for its insight as for its technical skill, yet it is Porter’s skill, not just his vision or composition, that made the image what it is. And the informed eye loves to linger over that shimmering detail. The image itself is so powerful, however, that it largely survives conversion into a poster in which much of the detail doesn’t come through. It impresses plenty of people who aren’t schooled in the art or history of photography.

Given how famous Porter’s image has become in the intervening years, you can imagine my surprise when I saw a damned near duplicate on Webshots earlier this month. Webshots is a photo-sharing site run by American Greetings. The copyrighted photo is by Willard Clay, a professor of botany who, according to the bio on his web site, became a landscape photographer about 25 years ago (at which point Porter’s image was at least 10 or 11 years old). Clay has published at least half a dozen photo books and currently teaches photography at Morton Arboretum, Lisle, IL, right in Chicago’s back yard. You can read Clay’s bio here.

The thing you need to know at this point is that Eliot Porter was part of that first generation of truly great American photographers that includes Adams, Edward Weston, Weston’s sons Brett and Cole, Imogen Cunningham, and Alfred Stieglitz, among others. He was a contemporary of and knew both Adams and Stieglitz and was a friend of Stieglitz’s wife, painter Georgia O’Keeffe. This is impressive company. Unlike the others, Adams and Porter stuck mostly to landscapes and nature photography, which is why their work later became favored material for Sierra Club publications (Porter was even a member of the board of directors of the Sierra Club from 1966 to 1968). The same is true for Galen Rowell and David Muench, who are from the second generation of great American landscape photographers: Sierra Club desk calendars and copies of National Geographic are where I and many others first saw their work. Willard Clay is a pro, to be sure, and well published, but next to Porter and Adams and certainly in the history of photography, he’s small potatoes. In fact, in his bio, Clay names Eliot Porter as one of his influences.

And the striking similarity of the two images is just something I can’t dismiss. About the only difference I can see is that Porter’s original was a vertical image and Clay’s is a horizontal. That’s it.

Which is why I marvel that nobody appears to have noticed how closely Clay copied the Big Sur shot, and that no one has remarked about that on Webshots. Given the short attention span of so many Internet denizens and the fact that unless they’ve studied photography, most people under 40 don’t know anything about Eliot Porter even if they have seen this famous image, I can’t say that I’m surprised. But I am concerned. While it is true that anyone at all is free to stand in the same spot where Porter stood and shoot the same picture, it’s another thing to copyright that image and pass it off as your own without acknowledging the debt to Porter, who got it first and best.

Is there such a thing as visual plagiarism, and is this an example? I think so. Judge for yourselves. But it concerned me enough that earlier today, I sent an e-mail to and posted a blog comment on Webshots. I have no idea who, if anyone, will receive or read my comment, but I sure hope someone does and mentions it to Willard Clay. He has to know that his image is very nearly a clone of Porter’s and that at the very least he owes a debt to the earlier image, one that should be acknowledged. Why not just call it an homage and provide some attribution that way? Perhaps he will, once the situation is pointed out to him. One can hope.

Meanwhile, below is the text of the e-mail I sent to and blog comment that I made (the two are identical) on Webshots for their blog entry on June 7th, 2011, the day that Clay’s shot was a featured photo. Please note that I sent the e-mail via Webshots’ own customer support page rather than sending a letter through the mail because they made it nearly impossible for me to send them an e-mail directly, and I didn’t want my comment to get lost in snail mail to the lawyers. Here it is:


26 June 2011

Over the years, I've enjoyed the work of many of the professional photographers that Webshots has featured. That includes the work of Willard Clay. However, when I saw the June 7th post of his photo of the Big Sur coastline, headlined "Foggy Morning Along Highway 1, Big Sur, California," something nagged at me. More than two weeks later, here I am to tell you that I finally know what it was: it's virtually the same photo that Eliot Porter made famous more than three decades ago, taken from roughly the same location and angle (the distribution of rocks in the surf is the dead giveaway), though Clay zoomed in a touch more than Porter did in the original.

Frankly, that Porter photo is so famous that I'm surprised a) that nobody at Webshots realized it or mentioned it to Clay and b) nobody online has remarked about it, either in your blog comments or elsewhere. Although it's not exactly the equivalent of plagiarism as anyone with enough skill, patience and the right equipment could duplicate that shot if he/she were willing to go to the trouble, it *is* true that Porter was the first to get that shot and print it -- and that his photo is one of several that helped to create the interest in Big Sur in the first place.

Porter, who died in 1990, was an acquaintance and contemporary of both Ansel Adams and Edward Stieglitz and a friend of Stieglitz's wife, painter Georgia O'Keeffe. As with Adams's work, Porter's photos found their way into Sierra Club calendars and publications. Porter's work also became well known through his gallery shows and through the museum posters created for exhibits. I remember having just such a poster of the Big Sur shot back in my very first apartment (I recall that I bought it at Pier 1, so it was in pretty wide distribution).

Porter left much of his work to the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. The museum has since put a collection guide online. A look at the following web page will show you the 1975 photo I'm talking about - it's titled "Mist On Coast, Big Sur, California, September 25, 1975":

http://www.cartermuseum.org/collections/porter/collection.php?asn=P1990-51-1212&mcat=4&scat=25

Porter's shot is more vertical, Clay's is horizontal -- but there, the difference ends. Clearly, Clay wanted to duplicate Porter's shot, either consciously or unconsciously, but Porter got the shot first. And that should be acknowledged to all those who see Clay's photo on your web pages and may not know about Porter's work. Moreover, given the importance of intellectual property rights and how critical that must be to Clay's own work, I'd think he'd appreciate that, too. Finally, as far as I know, Porter didn't sell all the rights to that photo to anyone in perpetuity though he clearly allowed it to be made into a poster (presumably, all that can be checked with his estate), and either his estate or the museum might still hold the rights to that image.

Yes, it's true that anyone can photograph any part of nature that is publicly accessible, and in that sense, nature can't be copyrighted, though specific images can; but Eliot Porter is the person who immortalized that image of the Big Sur coast, and the world should remember that. So should you.