I can write stories.
I can take pictures.
Sometimes, I can even write stories and take pictures simultaneously.
But I can not write stories, take pictures and keep track of a lens cap all at the same time.
(And don’t say ‘just use a UV filter.’ Because then I would just say: I can not write stories, take pictures and keep a lens reasonably clean all at the same time.)
Conversation at a roadside food stall, while waiting for my tempeh to cook (imagine my half in very broken Indonesian):
Bapak: Where are you from? Australia?
Me: No, America.
Bapak: Oh…Obama is from here, you know.
Me: Yeah…
Bapak: He lived in Menteng.
Me: Menteng Dalam, right?
Bapak: Yes. Practically our neighbor.
Me: Do you know him?
Bapak: Hahahah. I know him. But he does not know me.
So, one of my photographs was the lead image on MotherJones.com today. Cool, right? Except they didn’t pay me, ask me, or even notify me. I just followed the incoming link from my flickr account and saw it up there.
Legally, they were well within their rights. Mother Jones is a non-profit news organization and I had the picture up under a creative commons license that allows for non-commercial use.
But it still feels juuuust this side of shady. Mother Jones, last time I checked, was still in the habit of paying for content.
This is not the first time something like this has happened, and it makes me really aware of the uncomfortable divide I’m straddling by being someone who believes in the transformative potential of web2.0 and someone who has bills to pay, no day job and few other marketable skills.
I put a lot of my images out under a creative commons license, and some of them get around quite a bit. These three, in particular, mostly on various blogs and NGO reports (that I know about, at least!):
Waterboarding Demonstration, Berkeley, Calif.
Deforestation near the Burmese-Chinese border
Illegal Wildlife Trade, Mong La, Burma
Waterboarding, deforestation, and the illegal wildlife trade. All significant issues, and I’m genuinely happy that these pictures can play a role in keeping public discussion moving. I keep them out there, available for people to use, and most people are really considerate about it, writing to let me know when they’re using them, checking to see how I want the work attributed. It makes me feel like a contributing member of some sort of global community. When other people are laboring purely out of love, I’m happy to do the same.
I’m resigned to a certain amount of unpaid work while I’m in graduate school. It’s kind of the nature of the exercise. And really, I don’t have much to complain about. I’m here in sunny California on a full ride, with everything from my gear to my rent to my plane tickets to Asia coming out of taxpayers’ pockets. At bare minimum, I think that leaves me with the obligation to be a little bit socially useful.
On the other hand, those pictures represent effort, skill, and risk – particularly the two from Burma. That third picture was shot from the hip in one of the sketchiest border towns on earth, and I very easily could’ve gotten my camera smashed – if not my teeth – for my trouble.
There’s a real reason people expect to be paid for that kind of work. And the minute I feel like somebody else is making a profit at my expense, it puts me on edge. Particularly because of the larger context this is happening in. Publications are popping up left and right, and – fear-mongering aside – there’s still plenty of money being made on the internet. The problem is very little of it is going to the people who are actually out there, boots on the ground, producing content. And by letting people who could afford to pay for photographs use my work for free, I feel like I’m becoming part of the problem. Not only am I not getting paid, but some other photographer also didn’t get an assignment because the art editor just went and pulled something off the internet.
I’m worried that people like me are keeping people like me from making a decent living. But I don’t know what to do about this problem that wouldn’t suck too much life out of the vital people-to-people conversation of the social web.
Thoughts?
p.s. Delicious irony: got this link sent to me while writing this post: Someone Bids $13,000 for Huffington Post Internship
It seems like most of the people in my life have had to deal with a lot of negativity from me lately. So, to counter it, here’s a short and (thankfully) by no means comprehensive list of things that have made me smile in the last few days:
I turn 27 today – old enough that birthdays not divisible by five don’t seem particularly significant. Still, it’s always good punctuation to the year. In fact, whenever I’m confused by the chronology of my own life, I tend to try to orient myself by birthday. Like, “Okay, that was just after I left Mostar, which was where I was heading on my 21st birthday, so I guess it must’ve been in 2003.”
Looking back over the last 10 birthdays, in fact, is quite a good series of snapshots in my life.
17 – It was during very last weeks before I moved out of my parents’ house for good. A strange, chaotic time, but also one when life felt completely open, replete with possibilities. I remember I had planned to go to Baltimore, but was trapped in by an unexpected snowstorm.
18 – Flagstaff, Arizona. A birthday party that more or less happened without me. I had been living out on the Navajo reservation, doing support work for traditional elders fighting forced relocation off their ancestral lands. Or, to put it in less glamorous terms, getting up at sunset, cooking breakfast on a woodstove, feeding animals and shoveling goat shit all day, then passing out at sundown. I had the chance for a ride into town on my birthday, and jumped at the opportunity (Electricity! Hot shower! Pay phones! Internet!). I split the cost of a hotel room with friends, and got enthusiastic about having a little birthday gathering. Unfortunately, as soon as the sun started to go down, so did my eyelids. My friend Nettle gave me a massage for my birthday present, then let me slip into blissful sleep while everyone else tried to have a very quiet party.
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I know that what I really need is a nice vacation, a week off to relax, get enough sleep and rest, and get caught up on my backlog of unfinished projects. (See below.)
But airfares are so low right now I’m more than a little tempted to grab my camera, throw a few changes of clothes into a backpack, head to the airport and wind up somewhere completely unexpected.
I’m not entirely certain what winding mental path led me to the rectory of St. Catherine’s Church in Carcar, Cebu. Some of it has to do with reading for a course on literature of social movements in the Philippines — it was to Carcar that the Visayan revolutionary Leon Kilat went seeking reinforcements for his stand against the Spanish army in Cebu city, only to be betrayed and murdered.
And I’m thinking, more generally, about where historical research and investigative journalism intersect and overlap. More on that later, perhaps. In the meantime, some photos from this summer:
I just listened to some sound recordings I took at the demonstration yesterday (which I’m probably never going to do anything with, because it’s tedious work and time is short) and I couldn’t help but notice that the old standby “el pueblo unido jamás será vencido,” was perhaps not the most appropriate choice for a demonstration against Israeli airstrikes in Gaza.
In Spanish (as you probably know) the chant translates to “the people united will never be defeated.” As it happens, though, the Spanish word jamás, which means ‘never’, sounds almost exactly the same as Hamas, especially when chanted. So, an alternative translation comes out something like “The people united, Hamas will be defeated.”
Just saying.
I arrived home to another piece of what I’ve come to refer to as “Jew mail.” In this case, it was a fundraising letter from Peace Now, a pro-two-state solution group that monitors human rights violations by Israeli settlers. But I’m not even going to get into the politics of it, because it’s just as often something about an upcoming event at the new Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, or a sample copy of a Jewish literary journal. It’s clear the mail is targeted to a Jewish audience — the envelope on this particular piece was printed with a paragraph begining with “For anyone whose Bubbe ever warned them, as ours did us….” And my roommate, who gets far more junk mail than I do, doesn’t get anything like this.
Thing is, though, I’ve never been a member of a temple, or any other Jewish organization. The only explanation I can come up with is that someone, somewhere, has gone through voter rolls or mailing lists, and identified every Jewish-sounding surname, then sold it off as a special, targeted mailing list. (Or maybe a computer. It amuses me to imagine a database function set to pull up all names ending in -man, -sky, -stein, -berg, etc.)
I’m sure it’s not actually that uncommon. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are similar lists for Hispanic or Korean or Irish names. But it still weirds me out a little every time I get one of these things.
And every time, I say to myself I should try do a story about how these lists get built. Maybe someday, I’ll actually get around to it.
I went to a truly beautiful party at the Capoeira Angola Foundation last night — capoeira, live bossanova and samba, Veracruzan dance. By the time midnight rolled around, the party had kicked off, and people were busting out the kind of crazy cumbia and samba moves where you find yourself being flipped over and swung around the room.
So I stripped myself of wallet, keys, phone, glasses and anything else that could conceivably fly off my person while this was going on. Gathered all my stuff up, put it in my bag, and…I think you can see where this story is going.
I was in a place that felt safe, where nearly everyone knew each other. So I wasn’t worried about my things, except to make sure my bag was up on a shelf where nobody would accidently step on it.
But when I was ready to go home, my bag wasn’t where I’d left it, and neither was another woman’s. It was 2:00 am in West Oakland, and my credit cards, id, bus pass, cellphone, ipod, glasses and keys were gone.
I couldn’t even get home, because my bicycle was outside, locked-up with a key I no longer had.
The only wordly posessions I had access to were the clothes on my back and the contents of my jacket pockets — three crumpled dollar bills, and half a pack of somebody else’s menthol lights. [Read more...]