Today, CBC News reported the City of Calgary’s planned removal of a government-funded public art installation from its 4th Street underpass. Its reason? British comedians had complained that their photos were used without their permission.
The artwork named SNAPSHOTS was made by artist, Derek Michael Besant, and installed in October 2015. It is a collection of six-by-seven feet Polaroids featuring a blurred-out picture and phrase meant to portray the lives of Calgarians, the people who walk or drive through the underpass. He was paid $20,000 for the art project by the City of Calgary.
In an interview with Avenue Calgary on December 2015, Besant had claimed that he visited the underpass with a camera, recorder and notepad, observing those who walked through it and interacting with them to get an idea of who they were over the course of a few days. Besant claimed that he had finally selected 20 people at random from the pedestrians he had met with at the underpass and used their pictures as well as phrases which he had gotten from his interviews with them to create the art installation.
Over the last two years, these portraits hung on the walls of the Calgary underpass as original works of Besant, until recently, when a fellow campmate of British stand-up comedian Bisha Ali contacted her with news that her blown up and blurred picture adorned the walls of the underpass of Calgary, a city she has never visited. She did not believe him and asked for a picture. What she saw was quite unbelievable – it was her headshot, blurred but definitely hers. Incredulous, Bisha Ali began to investigate the art installation and found out that there were some other British comedians whose headshots had been blurred, reproduced and used by Besant without their consent and knowledge.
She took to Twitter to voice her displeasure with the use of her image without her consent or knowledge or proper credit to the photographer. The resultant brouhaha on social media across continents revealed that about 12 out of the 20 portraits had been taken directly from the promotional brochure of the 2015 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, which is an annual gathering of comedians and actors. These included pictures of Chris Betts, Harriet Kemsley, Damian Clark, Matt Reed, Gary Coleman, Paul Savage and Lesley McAra.
Isabelle Adam, Ali’s friend and head of Comedy 4 Kids, a photographer herself, created this montage comparing the original brochure photos with those of the art installation:
According to Andy Hollingworth, a British photographer, whose photo was used in the installation without his consent in his interview with Postmedia, “The artist involved could have taken their own images of local people to create local impact, to tell a truthful story. Did they have very little time, so lifted images from the same source in order to fulfill the criteria for their generous public commission?”
Another British comedian, Sofie Hagen, also confirmed that her photo was also blurred and used by Besant without her consent. In her interview with Postmedia,
Finding out that your face has been hanging in an underpass in Calgary for two years is strange, to say the least. ($20,000) is a lot of money for what is basically, as it seems right now, stealing.
After a flurry of angry social media posts from local and international artists, the City of Calgary issued a statement on Tuesday confirming that it had contacted Besant who has asked that the installation be taken down. It is interesting to note that Besant had exhibited some of his work at the 2015 Edinburgh Art Festival and may have stumbled upon the promotional materials for the 2015 Edinburgh Festival Fringe at the same time. The pictures in the brochure may have inspired Besant’s art project for the City of Calgary which was installed just a few months after the Edinburgh event. Karla Gowlett who had taken Sofia Hagen’s picture, stated in an email toMacleans that
Edinburgh Fringe Festival is such a wonderful month full of artists that I am so glad we were collectively such an inspiration to him, even if it unfortunately clouded his ability to complete the assignment adequately.
Besant has not made any comments about the controversy surrounding his art installation. Besant is an accomplished artist who has won several international awards and was the head of the drawing department at the Alberta College of Art and Design from 1977 to 1993. He is well known for his unorthodox use of materials and technology in creating exhibitions, installations and collaborations as a Canadian artist. He is not a stranger to intellectual property rights. One wonders why he chose to use copyrightable materials instead of taking his own materials as he had professed in his 2015 interview.
In creating art, there is a very thin line between inspiration and copying. While there is nothing wrong with being inspired by another artist’s works, an artist may unintentionally project qualities of that other work into their own creation, thereby opening themselves up to copyright infringement claims. In Besant’s case, the unauthorized use of the photographs was plagiarism – a blatant copying of another artist’s work.
Under the Canadian Copyright Act, artists have certain moral rights in relation to their works – the right to the integrity of the work and, in connection with an act mentioned in section 3 of the Act, the right, where reasonable in the circumstances, to be associated with the work as its author by name or under a pseudonym and the right to remain anonymous. The artist’s right to integrity can be infringed where the work is distorted, mutilated, or otherwise modified or used with a product, service, cause or institution, to the prejudice of its author’s honour or reputation.
What Besant has done with his unauthorized use of the photographs is to breach the moral rights of the photographers of these photographs. Although he modified the images by flipping them, making them a mirror image and blurring them, these photographs were clearly copied materials. This begs the questions, “What was Besant’s rationale for using these copyrighted materials?”, “Why didn’t he just take pictures of pedestrians using the walkway like he had professed in his 2015 interview with Avenue Calgary?”, “Why didn’t he give credit to the original photographers at the very least, or made the effort to contact them for their consent to use their works in his project?”.
Bisha Ali has said that, in her opinion, taking down the portraits seemed like a double waste of tax money. According to Ali, Bessant broke the code among artists. Artists don’t plagiarize each other, they respect and support each other. Bisha Ali, and the other comedians and photographers, whose rights were infringed upon by Bessant want to know why he did what he did.
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