Vanity Fair's article on Vampire Weekend's mystery cover girl's lawsuit
BLOT: (25 Aug 2010 - 03:15:44 PM)
Vanity Fair's article on Vampire Weekend's mystery cover girl's lawsuit
I like Vampire Weekend's
Today though, I read Vanity Fair's "Vampire Weekend's Mutinous Muse" and learned that the photo was a source of consternation for a number of people. Not just the band and the [at least claimed] photographer, but also the model in it. Because it was an actual model, and the shot may or may not have been a non-signed photo taken at an early photo shoot of hers, left on a back photo board and purchased for five thousand dollars by the band.
Kennis might have chosen to ignore the whole thing, if only that had been an option*. Parking her car on Columbus Avenue, in Manhattan, she saw a poster of the album cover pasted to a storefront's construction scaffolding; flipping through The New York Times, she saw a picture of the band using her photo as a giant concert backdrop; walking into the Gap, she heard Vampire Weekend playing over the speakers. Friends said they'd seen the cover in Montreal and even Finland.
The article is interesting, because it brings up a lot of questions. Did Ted Brody actually take it? If not, as the model—Ann Kirsten Kennis— says, how did he get an old Polaroid of her that a family member might have taken? And if this is all under the table and less than legit, how much is Vampire Weekend responsible for re-imbursing Kennis? It also brings up the fact that there is something of a generation gap going on here. While younger fans might not see what the big deal is, one has to keep in mind that hundreds and hundreds of digital photos being uploaded to Flickr and Deviant Art and Picasa is not, as it were, an old invention. Now we inundate our personal images across time and space, project it with feeble copyright notices into the great beyond. For most of the history of the photograph: quantity used to be a much more controlled thing.
In an age when photos are easily swapped around the Internet and everyone with a camera phone has become a photographer, this lawsuit is more than just a cautionary tale. It's a symptom of an increasingly treacherous generation gap. "You start to see interviews from fans of the band, and they are like, 'I would just be glad that my picture was on it.' Well, not really. They are using it for their gain," says Kennis, who came of age at a time when anyone whose image was used and distributed could expect to reap sizable financial rewards.
And while most of me thinks that Vampire Weekend (and all their associated peoples) should make this right as best they can (and maybe they should have talked to the model before assuming no one would care), I can't help but point out that she didn't seem to contact the band at all before pressing a two million dollar lawsuit. I guess that's just not the way these things are done.
TAGS: Music
* Or, your know, if the option of "not ignore" hadn't been monetarily viable.
BY WEEK: 2010, Week 34
BY MONTH: August 2010
dickens of a blog
Written by Doug Bolden
For those wishing to get in touch, you can contact me in a number of ways
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
The longer, fuller version of this text can be found on my FAQ: "Can I Use Something I Found on the Site?".
"The hidden is greater than the seen."
