Who Owns a Photograph?Photography, Ownership, and the Archive We Leave Behind
There is a question that sits underneath all street photography, all documentary work, all the years of accumulated frames on a hard drive: who does a photograph actually belong to?
It sounds simple. You take it, you own it. Except it isn't simple at all.
The Carol Highsmith Case
Carol Highsmith has spent decades doing something extraordinary — photographing America. Not the postcard version, not the landmarks and the skylines, but the real thing: the backwaters, the diners, the forgotten main streets, the quiet corners of a vast country that most photographers never think to point a camera at. Her archive runs to hundreds of thousands of images and represents one of the most significant documentary projects in American photographic history.
She donated the entire archive to the Library of Congress. For free. For the public. For future generations.
Browse Carol Highsmith's archive at the Library of Congress
Carol Highsmith's America — official site
What happened next is one of the more jaw-dropping stories in recent copyright law. Highsmith attempted to use one of her own photographs — an image she had created, that she had donated to the public domain — and received an invoice from Getty Images demanding a licence fee. Getty had been scraping public domain images from the Library of Congress and relicensing them as though they owned them.
Highsmith sued for over a billion dollars. The court ruled against her on a technicality of damages. She couldn't recover what she'd lost. Case closed.
The photographer who gave her life's work to the public, for free, was billed for using her own image.
Why We Shoot
That case forces a question that every photographer should sit with: why are you taking photographs, and what do you want to happen to them?
The easy answer is personal pleasure. The slightly more honest answer is ego — the desire to be seen, to have your eye validated. But the deeper answer, the one that gets more interesting the older you get, is something about time.
I have been looking back through my archive recently. twenty years of street photography. The fashions alone are a document — the clothes people wore, the shops behind them, the buildings that are no longer there. Photographs I took without thinking twice about have become, quietly and without permission, historical records.
Street photography is always, on some level, an act of preservation. You are stopping time at a specific point and holding it still. The question is: for whom?
Jason Eskenazi on Protecting the Archive
I came across this idea reinforced recently watching Paulie B's exceptional Walkie Talkie series — an interview with photographer Jason Eskenazi that's well worth an hour of your time.
Eskenazi makes the point directly: you have to protect your own archive. Not just from hard drive failure or flood or fire, but from the systems — commercial, legal, algorithmic — that will commodify your work the moment you let it out of your hands without understanding what you're doing.
Highsmith understood that. She made a deliberate choice to give her archive to the public, in perpetuity, free of charge. What she didn't anticipate was that someone else would pick it up and sell it back.
The Hard Drive Question
Here is the version of this question that I think about: do we keep photographs stored on hard drives for our own private pleasure, or do we make them for future generations to view?
I don't think it has to be one or the other. But I do think it requires a decision — or at least an awareness. Because photographs left on a hard drive that nobody ever sees are, in a real sense, not finished yet. And photographs released into the world without thought about where they go and who profits from them can end up somewhere their maker never intended.
The Highsmith case is an extreme version of something that happens at every level of photography. The work you make has value — to you, to history, to people who haven't been born yet. That value doesn't evaporate because you gave it away. It just moves somewhere else.
Know where it's going.
Until next time, keep snapping
