It’s a little out of date, but there were some amazing photos taken when the Space Shuttle repaired the Hubble Space Telescope. The Sacremento Bee compiled some of great photos of the repair mission, but I think the photos by Thierry Legault of Atlantis moving in front of the sun were the best.
This year, to commemorate the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests, the New York Times has coverage of the photographers who took the photos of the man confronting a tank. Four different photographers captured the iconic confrontation. They also have coverage of a fifth photographer, Terril Jones, who recently released his photos taken at ground level.
Google recently announced that Life had published their photo collection on their system. It’s a project Life was working on while I was still at Time Inc, and it’s beautiful collection of photography. Most of the Life photos have been buried in the basement of Time Inc. for years; limited digital versions were only available internally to Time Inc. on clunky systems. It’s great that the images are now available to everyone in the world.
I’m curious about some aspects of the Life collection. The collection includes a large number of images from the Apollo missions with a copyright attributed to Time Inc. From visiting the NASA web sites, I’ve always thought that the NASA images were either in the public domain, copyright NASA (and by extension the people of the United States), or copyright another space agency. It was a bit surprising to see images like the classic image of Buzz Aldrin next to the American flag with a Life watermark and Time Inc. copyright, especially when the original image is available at the Great Images in NASA web site. (High resolution images are also available.) I’ve dropped a note to the NASA public affairs office at NASA for some clarification; it’s entirely possible that NASA and Time Inc. signed an agreement regarding the copyright years ago. One of the wins of having the Life collection available is that there are images now published that were not previously available on NASA’s website. For example, I was unable to find this specific image of Earth from Apollo 10 on the NASA site, even though there are other images from around the same time at the Kennedy Space Center site.
I was surprised to see that Life is selling physical copies of images with celebrities. I assume they are sharing the proceeds of the physical copies with the photographers if they do not own all of the rights, but were they able to secure model releases from celebrities? For example, you can purchase a framed copy of the Time cover image of Michael Jordan by Walter Iooss Jr., or a red-carpet photo of Elle MacPherson with a happy clown. (Surprisingly, the Elle MacPherson photo is uncredited.) Historically, one of the problems photographers and organizations have had in monetizing their photo collections has been issues of photographer rights and model releases, so I’m curious how Life managed to research and clear the photos.
Overall, having the Life collection online is a good thing for professional photographers, researchers, and the public at large. The photography of Life would not be possible without the fundamental freedoms and innovation of the United States, and it’s great that they are able to share their fruits of their labor.
My friend Andrew was in town (from Los Angeles) to take photos at the U.S. Open; he flew in from China after working at the Olympics.
We went out to dinner with Shiho and Keith, two other talented photographers.
I didn’t get a good photo of Andrew, but I did manage to take a quick snapshot of Shiho and Keith.
