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Originally Posted by sphere and ash
I've been thinking about the sentence, "the gold-border portraits are attributed to him because they alone are copyrighted under his name," and it doesn't make sense. Just because you hold a copyright doesn't mean that you're the artist. All it means is that Thompson was the employer or commissioning party.
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I think we are saying the same thing here. The story about the boat race clearly shows that photos were published under his name that he did not take.
Quote:
Originally Posted by sphere and ash
I respectfully disagree with Lordstan that the most one can say is that other photographers took some Thompson agency images. There is no evidence at all that Thompson took a single image after he started his agency. Quite to the contrary, The New York Times made it a point to note that Thompson was not an "expert cameraman" and that the success of his business depended on "able associates."
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Well. I can understand your point. I think we are talking about semantics here. Having success "depending on able body associates" is not the same as not taking any photos at all. If he took only 1%, or for that matter even only 1, of the photos then the statement in the Obit is still true. I hold by my conclusion in that there is no doubt that others took photos for him, but there is nothing stated or implied that he never took ANY.
All of this is, of course, focusing on the minutiae of semantics. The reality is that Thompson photos are pretty great regardless of who took them. Considering that many seem to share the same aesthetic, it is likely that he had one main photographer who did the bulk of his work.