Ansel Adams Image Resurrects 1980s Debate
If you practice law long enough, things come back around. I was reminded of my days representing the Directors Guild of America in its fight against the colorization of black and white movies when I read an article about the colorizing of an Ansel Adams photograph by a prominent gallery owner, who exhibited it at the Association of International Photography Art Dealers (AIPAD).
I imagine that the heirs of Adams felt about the same way when they viewed the colorized image as the directors and actors I worked with — Martin Scorsese, Milos Forman and Fred Zinnemann, among others — when they saw their carefully planned black and white films in distracting color. Film legend Jimmy Stewart, joined by Ginger Rogers and Burt Lancaster, excoriated the colorized images that altered the artistic core of their classic films.
The coloring techniques may be more sophisticated in an era of AI, but the commercialization goals and adverse impact on artistic integrity are the same.
Crucially, this is not simply a copyright issue. Like Ted Turner, who had purchased the MGM film library and its copyrights, the offending gallery has a right under U.S. copyright law to exploit artistic works now in the public domain. However, it is both a moral and a legal issue not answered just by turning to copyright law. Both the Berne Treaty, an international convention whose Article 6bis protects the name and reputations of artists for themselves and their heirs from unapproved alterations of original works, and the Lanham Act, a U.S. statute protecting against misrepresentations in commerce, must be considered. Whether the gallery had the unfettered right to exploit the colorized Moonrise as it did and associate it with Ansel Adams’ name and reputation is not self-evident nor simply a copyright question. Indeed, under Italian moral rights law, I successfully shepherded litigation to halt exploitation of Fred Zinnemann’s black and white MGM film classic, The Seventh Cross, even securing financial damages for his heirs.
Even though colorizing Ansel Adams’ classic black and white photograph may have justification under copyright law, the legal debate should focus on how the gallery exploits Ansel Adams’ name and reputation to better determine whether the unauthorized AI transformations violate the rights of artists and their heirs. I would urge AIPAD’s Board of Directors to investigate all aspects of this sensitive and important artistic issue.