Judges and Images: Lessons from Contextual Studies of Photography for Copyright Discourse

Introduction

For this seminar, we are joined by Oğulcan Ekiz, a PhD in law student at the School of Law, Queen Mary University of London to discuss his research on copyright law’s impact on the recontextualisation of photography. Drawing on the contextual studies on photography, Ekiz looks forward to gathering and analysinh qualitative data regarding the law’s impact on three professions’ engagement with photography: art historians, curators, and photography editors. We will start off the discussion with a presentation from Oğulcan, and then open up the rest of the seminar to questions from the convenors and the audience.

Copyright law and Contextual Studies of Photography

This study examines copyright adjudication as a contextual element of photographs' meaning. It looks at the studium of the image—its social, cultural, or historical meaning—which is shaped through the physical context in which a photograph is perceived and the social context in which the image is treated in certain ways through different discourses. And it looks at copyright adjudication as an independent discourse with its own norms, culture, and concepts such as authorship and originality that have long been appropriated to signify distinct features. Finally, this research argues for a double shift in images’ meaning through the process of adjudication—the first one is a shift in the significance of authorship of the image (a point of significance for the local copyright discourse), and the second one is a change in the image’s context of circulation (a point of significance for the general public and photography discourse).