Photographing Buildings

There have been a few comments on earlier posts made recently about what it might mean to photograph buildings, versus people, especially with reference to structures with vigorously defended copyrights (Sydney Opera House, Eiffel Tower).

The first thing to note is that an encounter with a building is not, fundamentally, a social encounter. Yes, yes, you could fiddle about and say that it is after all because "social" means a lot of things or whatever, but what I mean is not that. When we meet a human being, these is a whole mess of communication, of back and forth, and glances, body language, words, gestures. None of that happens with a building.

So, a photograph of a building does not constitute a bisected social interaction in the way that a photo of a person does. Yes, both photos conjure you into the presence of the subject, but the building's half of the interaction is pretty much the same as it would be in real life. It just sits there. You can't go into it, or walk around it, but otherwise the interaction is pretty much the same. Where we lack the instinctive/somatic tools to make complete sense out of a photo of a person, I do not think that we lack those tools to make sense of a building photo.

The practical issue you encounter when you photograph the Opera House is copyright, of course. If I photograph your photograph, I've copied it, and the right to do so is to a degree controlled by you. Ditto a painting. The line gets blurrier when the object is a sculpture, or when your art is only part of my picture, and the laws bend, duck, and weave in efforts to accomodate that.

Architects, I think, claim that the visual form of their buildings is a thing that it subject to copyright? And that therefore they should be permitted to exert a degree of control over anyone copying that?

This sounds like bullshit to me, to be blunt. By placing the building in public, they permit it to be seen. The gap between being seen and being photographed is not that big. We are at the very remote end of a spectrum, far away from the "photographing a photo" end, and I think that legally this is the extreme end as well. Copyright law has been stretched this far, but not much farther. This seems like a purely monetary deal to me, the architect or designer wishes to both put their work out in to public spaces, but simultaneously control as much as possible about ways one might turn the visual form of the thing into money.

This seems to be related to ideas around the ownership of ones own likeness. While an attractive idea, it's not at all clear to me what a reasonable basis for this is. Privacy seems like a reasonable thing, the idea that I might want to get up to shit that's none of anyone's business is real and ought to be protected. The idea, though, that I can parade around in public, be seen, and still somehow control my likeness by judicious use of the law seems absurd.

While there is an argument to be made that "well, this is the sweat of my brow, I reserve the right to profit from it" the argument seems a little thin, and tends toward stifling the desirable consequences of copyright rather than encouraging them.

The point of copyright is to increase creation for the public good, not to turn every goddamned thing into a money spinner.