August 16, 2006 – Ownership of a Life

August 16, 2006 – Ownership of a Life

I’ve been thinking about my blog and its contents in light of an ongoing discussion I’ve been having with my wife IM about the ownership of the information I include in the blog. I’ve written a number of posts about my parents. I’ve described them and their friends, especially Charles Upton, in detail. Mr. Upton passed away and has no known family members. I could say I’m free to write about his life. He’s no longer on earth to object. And he has no heirs to claim ownership of what I say about him. I’m harping on this because I’m confused about who owns what when it comes to something that’s been written or filmed or made into an audio program.

One day last week I watched an A&E network presentation on the trial of Aileen Carol Wuornos. Her life was made into the movie entitled “Monster,“ which grossed $34.5 million in U.S. box office and earned the star Charlize Theron an Oscar for best actress. You could make the case that the writer, filmmaker, and actress Theron owned the story since they synthesized her life and her crime spree into a story that an audience was willing to pay to see Ms. Theron portray. However, if Wuornos had not lived the life the way she had there would be no story to tell. Her antisocial behavior, for which she received the death penalty, became the profits of highly socialized individuals who fit into the mainstream of the genteel middle class.

When I described the life of Don Steele in one of my blogs and then presented the transcript of the conversation I had with Don and his wife—the latter being a more compelling story than the former—that my original piece was based upon, did the story belong to Don and his wife or did my converting it from conversation to written text provide me some ownership of it? Since I’ve not published the piece for profit, there is nothing to argue over. Don got to tell his story in his own words and I got the satisfaction of writing something that some number of people read. Someone, like me, who longs to be a story teller is in reality retelling other peoples’ stories.

In this world of ours where everything becomes content: one of the London bombers setting off an explosive caught on someone's cellphone video camera and later broadcast; the last moment of a spurned male lover killing his girlfriend in a Manhattan bar before turning the gun on himself; thousands of lives being swept away by the tidal wave sweeping over Banda Aceh caught on video cameras—innocent vacationers in some tourist destination captured in digital still images or motion video and unknowingly posted on some website attracting any number of hits… Like Don’s transcribed remarks I captured and posted, these still and moving images and audio were likewise captured and published, though Don consented to my taping his conversation for later publication. The others, however, had no say in whether their images and utterances should be exhibited for public consumption.

When the white man, with their cameras and recording devices, first encountered primitive civilization, the natives refused to have themselves recorded, fearing that their spirit was somehow being imprisoned. You ever stop to consider that recording is doing just that. It’s capturing a fleeting moment in time and imprisoning it for as long as storage technology will allow it to be maintained. Looking back at the images IM and I captured of ourselves and our daughters, I see people who ceased to be the moment the picture was taken and the audio recorded—we have audio recordings of ourselves too.

In this modern age, I often wonder how many times I’ve been captured in someone else’s video or digital photo. When IM and I vacationed in Manhattan just after the new millennium, I had just gotten a new Nikon CoolPix digital camera and as we walked down The Avenue of the Americas, I kept snapping photos as we strolled. As I viewed the images later on my PC, I saw countless faces on the busy sidewalk coming toward us captured in the JPEG images now stored on my hard drive, many with expressions you’d find on the sidewalks of any large city, sullen, ecstatic, angry, sad, bored, every emotion you can imagine. If I showed the owners of those images these photos, they would probably ask that I not publish them for whatever reason—an unflattering expression, being with the wrong person, being with the right person but caught with an emotion that should be kept private…

You could argue that capturing someone in a photograph or video clip is no different than watching them with your eyes. In essence those images are caught in your mind consciously or unconsciously, but the great distinction between captured in the mind of the beholder and captured in digital video or still images is the ability to manipulate and proliferate the image, in a sense giving the captured moment a life of its own. I’m reminded of the picture on the cover of a 1985 National Geographic. It shows a pretty young peasant girl in Afghanistan with piercing green eyes and a sad resigned expression of a refugee orphaned during the Soviet Union's bombing of her country.

The photographer, Steve McCurry, captured all the anguish, loneliness, anger and despair of a 12-year trying to come to terms with a world which was for her then completely horrendous and hopeless. The photographer trapped the one last thing this young girl had, her stricken emotional state, and turned it into one of the most memorable photographs to ever grace the cover of the National Geographic. She went on trying to survive and to make sense of a senseless world. He went on to awards and praise for his work. Somehow it seems unfair. Her image was truly a captured spirit that affected everyone that looked upon it. In the modern world of content, a captured image is something pop culture idols turn into wealth. You could argue that paparazzi are stealing images of celebrities constantly. And that’s true, but the return for the celebrity is the proliferation of his image—there is no bad publicity, there is only publicity. The picture or angry outburst might easily lead to a part in a movie or play.

The great injustice comes from the unwitting participants in the game. In December 2002, I heard on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” a piece by John Burnett entitled “The Leaf Player of the Zocalo”. It told of a street musician named Carlos Garcia who played an English Ivy leaf that he blows across in Zocalo, a public square in Mexico City. He was recorded playing the song “Perfidia” and the recording was included on the Kronos Quartet CD “Nuevo.” The Mexican recording company that captured Garcia’s performance never paid him for his work, though Kronos had paid the recording company. I suspect that the piece on NPR raised the the Kronos Quartet’s consciousness to the injustice done to Garcia. The story stated that the group had set about raising funds to compensate Garcia for the money he should have received. I wonder if he was ever compensated—he supports his wife and four daughters on tips and a $60 a month government payment.

The discussion with IM—she hates me talking about her—made me aware that I too should tread lightly when it comes to telling the tales of others. My father doesn’t seem to mind so you can expect more tales of my Dad in future posts. He asked me once what he could leave me in his will and I said he could leave me his story and let me tell it. I only hope I do it justice.