His daughter Grace Leigh is involved with photography too — something I didn’t know until today when I saw a post on Facebook by Jack’s former colleague Susan Laney of Laney Contemporary.

Grace Leigh runs the experimental photo publication Mossless with her partner Romke Hoogwaerts, who founded the blog in 2009.

Together, Romke and Grace recently launched a Kickstarter campaign for their next project, MOSSLESS Issue Three: The United States (2003-2013). In the second minute of this video, Grace talks about Jack’s magnificent book The Land I’m Bound To.

An excerpt from the project description:

After a year of research, we spent five hard months producing Issue Three: The United States (2003-2013), an anthology of sorts, but rather a composition, of photographs of America from the last ten years. We encountered every photograph on the internet, on personal websites, or through Tumblrs, Flickr, and so on. We got hooked on the search, finding photographer after photographer with fascinating work about the lands and the people of this country. We have found among them photographers that rival the great American photographers of the past. But we wanted to publish the works all together to follow the changing atmosphere in photography.

As some of you know, I’m caught up in some aspects of the evolution of photography via social media and new media. I’m fascinated by this attempt to curate photographs that were first published via the web into a physical book. I’m donating for sure, and I hope some of Jack’s friends and fans will join me.

Armstrong was dismissing classes at noon that day because of the impending winter weather. By 12:37, I was back in my office and saw a 12:13 p.m. Facebook message from a former student, who just wanted to make sure that I knew that several of my early January photographs of the partially frozen Forsyth Park fountain had been broadcast on The Weather Channel.

I headed home shortly thereafter and kept one eye on The Weather Channel. Mid-afternoon, somewhat absurdly, The Weather Channel cut away to a correspondent in Forsyth Park, where there wasn’t even any rain, much less freezing rain or snow.

She mentioned that nothing was happening in Savannah yet, but then told viewers that the fountain was frozen just recently. And then several of my photos were shown. I’m not precisely sure which ones they showed, but here are a few from the full set:

My name was not mentioned, nor was this site, Savannah Unplugged. The images weren’t precisely what you see above. The copyright watermark had been cropped off, but my name had been added in the upper right portion of each image.

To anyone who understands anything about design, it’s pretty obvious that cropping out the watermark also compromises the integrity of the composition. So TWC not only used my photos without permission, but they made them worse.

Later on Tuesday, I was catching up on my emails from the day and found that a Senior Assignment Editor from The Weather Channel had emailed me at 9:47 a.m. asking for permission to use some of the images.

So let’s recap:

• The Weather Channel folks were faced with basically a non-event in Savannah, so they wanted to run photos of icy conditions from three weeks earlier. I wonder how many casual viewers assumed that those pics reflected current conditions?
• After finding my photos, the editors knew that they should seek my permission for their use. I was emailed at 9:47 a.m.
• By noon, without hearing from me, the photos appeared on air.
• Whoever prepared the clip knew that they shouldn’t run photos with a clear copyright watermark, so they cropped that out. At the same time, they knew that I should get credit for the photos, so they added my name elsewhere on the images.
• After I responded to the initial email, I was apologized to and was offered a clip of the broadcast. On the morning of Jan. 30, I emailed that I would like to get a clip. It’s now Feb. 2 and I haven’t heard a word.

The previous week in one of my classes, I found myself using the term “frantic laziness” to describe the current rush to put stories on the web or on the air. In the endless searches and races for content that will attract consumers, media outlets are cutting corners at almost every turn — and cutting staff too.

So somewhere in the process did The Weather Channel employees missed a crucial principle: We’d like to use these images that clearly belong to someone else, but we cannot do so until we receive his permission.  

Of course, if the editors had been truly focused on satisfying that charge, they could have tried other avenues. The most obvious, by far, would have been to send a message directly to the Facebook page for Savannah Unplugged. I would have seen that before the 11 a.m. class, for sure; it would have showed up as a notification on the Pages app on my iPhone. Or someone could have sent me a message on Facebook and a friend request simultaneously, which would have guaranteed that I’d see the message.

Given the thousands of similar violations of basic copyright and intellectual property law that one can find daily on the internet, what should I do in response, beyond writing this blog post? How much should I care about such flagrant and uncompensated use of my work by a national media outlet?

I actually asked my journalism students for their thoughts on the appropriate response. The responses varied (much like the responses from my Facebook network):

• Submit an invoice?
• File a lawsuit?
• Do something to try to make sure the TWC doesn’t do something like this again?
• Take advantage of the entire incident as a way of teaching that a photographer does not surrender ownership of photos by posting them online?

I’m still not quite sure what makes the most sense — or what would be worth the time.

But I know this: even in the face of flagrant, widespread, and lazy violations of copyright, we can’t just throw up our hands and surrender.

Ironically, I find that most photographers (especially those with other jobs) tend to be very generous about sharing their work, as long as permission is secured in advance and credit is given as agreed. TWC clearly knows better than to use my photos like this, but what about the students, band members, parents, and others who download and repost images I have captured? Some do so with credit but with no permission, while others take the time to alter the images in various ways. I could list dozens of personal examples over the last couple of years.

So, what next? I’m still not sure.

UPDATE, 2/10:
I’ve had some back and forth emails with a representative of the legal department of The Weather Channel. I now have these elements to add to this post:

• In the initial noontime airing, just two of my photos were used. They were both vertical ones, and the copyright watermark was not cropped out. Additional photos were used a few hours later and the watermark was cropped, as I note above.
• Oddly, the first two images had the proportions altered so that the fountain appeared wider than it really is.
• TWC insists that there was confusion. Someone on the ground in Savannah — a “freelancer” — said that permission to use fountain photos had been obtained, but that person never forwarded photos to the desk or to production.
• So the folks in production apparently thought that my set of images had been cleared for use.
• In response to my question about what exactly had allegedly been agreed to when permission was given, I was told that photos are only used on that day, etc.
• The legal representative also told me, in part: “Viewers provide us with content all day long. ” Of course, I was not a viewer and did not provide any content. Someone went to this website and downloaded images that are clearly owned by me. It strikes me as extremely poor practice for TWC to treat those two situations in the same way regarding communications, permissions, etc.

I have still not made a decision on further actions.

But I’ve been immersed to varying degrees in O’Connor’s life and work for I guess about a decade now, maybe longer. I’m still on the board of the Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home in Savannah (please like the Home on Facebook) and was president of the board for three years just after a major restoration of the museum house on Lafayette Square. My personal thanks to Linda Bruckheimer, Rena Patton, and others who were critical in making that restoration happen.

While I was president, we also hired our first — and still only — employee, launched the Ursrey Memorial Lecture Series (Alan Gurganus, Michael Cunningham, Jaimy Gordon, and Robert Olen Butler have appeared), and helped with the local launch of Brad Gooch’s biography Flannery, which was published by Little Brown.

And I’ve routinely taught O’Connor’s stories in my intro lit classes at Armstrong and presented a paper on criminality in her stories at a literary conference here a couple of years ago. I’ve given at least a couple of talks at the Childhood Home in the ongoing series of free Sunday lectures.

I was also involved a couple of years ago in launching Southern Discomfort, an exhibition and silent auction of works — almost all by Savannah area artists — inspired by Flannery O’Connor. I wrote about that first exhibit here, and Southern Discomfort 2 is now hanging at ThincSavannah at 35 Barnard St., just south of Ellis Square. The free reception and silent auction is Friday, Jan. 31 from 6 to 9 p.m. (silent auction ends at 8:30). Click here for the Facebook invitation.

I’ve worked on both Southern Discomfort shows with my Armstrong colleague Beth Howells, but the real work has been done by the artists. We’re offering all the invited artists a 50/50 split of the proceeds, by the way. That was something I insisted on from the very beginning; artists in Savannah are far too often asked to donate works in their entirety to nonprofit organizations, which can have the effect of devaluing the work.

But our offer to share the proceeds is only a small part of the reason that virtually everyone we ask decides to take part in the exhibit.

For many artists in this area, and around the world, O’Connor is a constant source of inspiration. Some find images in her short, intense life — her battle with lupus, the easy satire and irony of both her fiction and her early cartoons, the worlds of the farm and of the mind so fully chronicled in her letters, her love of peacocks and other fowl. Other artists turn to the stories themselves — the details of the hat in “Everything That Rises Must Converge”, a particular line in “The River”, the eerie presence of the hogs in “Revelation”.

Still other artists consider their creations so influenced by O’Connor that they’ve submitted pieces that are part of ongoing bodies of work.

Have any of these dealings with O’Connor’s legacy brought me closer to O’Connor herself? I don’t know.

On the one hand, I’d have to say no. Given the complexities of her fiction and her mind, and the simple fact that she died before I was born, I can never be sure that I know anything about her definitively.

But part of me desires to say yes. And I find myself looking past the easy interpretations of her work that rely so heavily on the concept of grace. Increasingly, I find myself fascinated by some of the darkest elements in O’Connor’s fiction — the tension between spirituality and sexuality, the omnipresence of criminals and the looming threat of sexual violence, the abyss of nihilism that her characters are so often on verge of falling into.

Cheery stuff.

Of course, it is cheery stuff. There’s nothing that can brighten a day more than O’Connor’s incisive wit.

The works in Southern Discomfort 2 encompass all those elements. Here’s a sampling:

“Revelation” by Curtis Bartone:

“Habit of Being” by Jack Metcalf:

“Young Horse” by Marcus Kenney:

“The Meanest of Them Sparkled” by Christine Sajecki:

“Finding Flannery” by Katherine Sandoz:

“Seven dollar hat” by Melinda Borysevicz:

I hadn’t been out to Tybee in a while by myself, and I hadn’t taken any photos out there for well over a year.

I just wandered around, got briefly in the water, walked along the pier, had an excellent dinner at the bar at the Tybee Island Social Club (loved the lobster tail taco), and then headed over to the lighthouse when I knew there should be some beautiful (if corny) sunset light.

The traffic and parking can be hellish on Tybee visits on the weekends and holidays, but, even at high summer, weekday evenings are pretty quiet as you can see.

So a few shots; click for larger versions:

And here are a couple of shots that I posted to my Instagram account:

I know it’s kind of trite, but I love the way the Instagram app will allow selective focus blurring like on the one taken from the pier.

The piece is primarily a Q&A with Fred Ritchin and has a provocative subtitle: “Renowned photography theorist Fred Ritchin has a simple message for those behind the camera: Innovate or die.”

From the introduction to the piece:

In late May, the Chicago Sun-Times took the unprecedented move of gutting its photography department by laying off 28 full-time employees, including John H. White, a 35-year veteran who had won the paper a Pulitzer. The nation’s 8th largest newspaper figured it could cut costs by hiring freelancers and training reporters to shoot iPhone photos, to which Chicago Tribune photographer Alex Garcia responded: “I have never been in a newsroom where you could do someone else’s job and also do yours well. Even when I shoot video and stills on an assignment, with the same camera, both tend to suffer. They require different ways of thinking.”

The Q&A comes on the heels of the publication of Ritchin’s new book Bending the Frame: Photojournalism, Documentary, and the Citizen. I think I’m going to have to pick this one up. Again from MJ:

Bending the Frame is a vigorous wake-up call to photojournalists to innovate or die. Photographers, Ritchen writes, should continually be asking how they can create more meaningful imagery rather than just chase the “trail of the incendiary.” I asked Ritchin to fill me in on the details. Interspersed throughout the interview are examples of photographic projects that he considers particularly innovative or audacious.

It’s no secret that the rise of digital cameras, which can capture images that do not require the complexities of darkroom printing and processing, revolutionized news photography. The revolution has actually been slower coming than I expected; I’m puzzled by the number of seasoned journalists who apparently did not see the writing on the wall and did not try to advance their own photo skills.

I’m struck too by the quote from Tribune photographer Garcia above. For someone trained to either be a photojournalist or a reporter, the skill sets might be very different — trying to do both could obviously hamper the ability to do either well.

But what about journalists of the future who learned to capture images from the time they were small children?

And we see radio news producers who are able to gather the news while capturing sound. Is it really so different to gather news and capture images?

There’s obviously a lot more in the piece. Highly recommended. Thanks to Jay Rosen for pointing this out via Twitter.

From that piece:

With a cellphone in every pocket, it has become second nature for most people to snap a picture or tap the video button at the slightest provocation — a babyâ€s giggle, a fallen tree or, just possibly, a drunk girl stripped naked by boys who donâ€t think twice. Over time, might the marginalizing effect of bystander detachment impede any impulse to empathize ?

Endowed with miraculous gadgetry and fingertip technology that allow reflex to triumph over reason, millions of young people today have the power to parlay information without the commensurate responsibility that comes with age, experience and, inevitably, pain.

The ease of cellphone photography and videography promotes a certain removal from circumstances, driving all into the bystander mode that leads to a massive shirking of responsibility and perhaps even a lack of cognitive awareness of oneâ€s own part in the moment.

The growing use of social media, the power of user-generated content, and the ethics of image publication and distribution routinely come up in the journalism courses that I teach at Armstrong Atlantic State University. All those issues come into play in the aftermath of the convictions in the Steubenville rape case.

Parker’s column manages to consider that incident in a broader context that includes the rape and murder of Kitty Genovese, who was not aided by any of the dozens of neighbors who heard part of the attack, and the famous photograph that Eddie Adams took of General Nguyen Ngoc Loan shooting Viet Cong operative Nguyen Van Lem.

It’s hard to cover so much ground so well in a newspaper column.

I follow a lot of economic and political news. I analyze a lot of census data. I keep in touch as best I can with some trends in contemporary music and try to be a culturally literate person.

But then I see something big — really amazing — that I have somehow missed entirely.

That’s how I felt earlier today when my friend Jason Nielubowicz sent a link to a post at Messy Nessic Chic about the work of street photographer Vivian Maier.

Maier worked as a nanny for decades, but no one she worked for knew that she was amassing a huge body of street photographs and videos shot in various neighborhoods in Chicago and New York. The work would have been lost from history if a box of undeveloped negatives hadn’t been randomly purchased at auction by John Maloof.

I’m not going to post any of the photos here without permission, but you can see some extraordinary work at Messy Nessy Chic or just go straight to the Vivian Maier archive that has been posthumously created (Maier died in 2009, before anyone saw any of these photos). There have also been a plethora of press reports about Maier, all of which I managed to miss.

And there’s a documentary in the works, Finding Vivian Maier, the official trailer for which has been viewed over 400,000 times:

Pretty remarkable stuff.

Those of us who have followed Marcus Kenney‘s career for a long time know about his amazing eye with a camera. But most of Marcus’ work over the last decade has focused on his paintings, collages, and sculptural assemblages. Marcus has justifiably earned wide acclaim for that diverse body of work, which often incorporates and challenges societal norms of the South, of childhood, of race, of corporate structures, and on and on.

That’s not to say that Marcus’ art always has some sort of clear social or political meaning — I don’t want to reduce it in those ways.

His recent show Underneath the Hope at Marcia Wood Gallery in Atlanta recently received a rave review in Art in America magazine. From that piece:

It almost seems wrong to say that Marcus Kenney draws heav­ily on his rural roots and Southern culture in his photographs, paintings and sculptures. The Louisiana native, now based in Savannah, Ga., offers work that is very much an extension of himself, not the product of an assumed esthetic meant to appeal to connoisseurs of the vernacular.

In his recent show “Underneath the Hope” (all works 2012), Kenney brewed a concoction of mystery and magic, but the air was not heavy with portent. His art is, in a word, fun. Yes, he touches on issues of race and politics, and he toys with taboos and transgressions, but his works are so exuberant and even-handed in their treatment that they don’t risk didacticism.

Kenney is a voracious consumer of materials and styles. Skulls are covered with sequins or bling. Tatty vintage taxi­dermy specimens are recycled into majestic otherworldly creatures. Ordinary items receive extraordinary adornments. Blithe dualism is the method of his alchemy.

“Underneath the Hope” was multimedia, but now Marcus Kenney the photographer has reasserted himself in a beautiful and provocative show — Fallen Animals — at SCAD’s Pinnacle Gallery at the corner of Habersham and Liberty here in Savannah.

I first discovered that Marcus was devoting significant time and energy to his photography a little over a year ago after he submitted a couple of pieces to an exhibition that I co-curated with Beth Howells in conjunction with the Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home: “Southern Discomfort: Art Inspired by Flannery O’Connor”. You can read more about that show here A couple of months after that exhibit, Marcus was one of several participating artists who talked about O’Connor’s influence in a Sunday afternoon presentation at the Childhood Home. As a series of his stunning new photographs scrolled behind him, he discussed the influence of both O’Connor’s fiction and photographer Robert Frank’s The Americans.

From the official description of “Fallen Animals”:

“Fallen Animals” is a solo exhibition of black-and-white photographs by SCAD alumnus Marcus Kenney (M.F.A., photography, 1998). This exhibition offers haunting portraits and landscapes as well as repeated motifs such as masks, hands and religious iconography that recall a Southern Gothic style. Displayed collectively, the imagery evokes an ominous and poignant narrative that touches on the universal themes of innocence lost, the questioning of faith, and the vulnerability of life.

Widely acclaimed for his work in collage, painting and sculpture, Kenney has developed this striking body of images since 2011. “Fallen Animals” is the first exhibition to focus solely on his photography since 1998.

I was struck by many things on my first viewing of the photos: the complex emotions of the children in some of the photos — as if the viewer could somehow see into their futures; the sheer beauty of the sometimes scrubby landscapes; the constructedness of some of the images using masks and other objects to create bizarre and haunting juxtapositions that mirror some of his collage paintings; the persistent symbolism of innocence; the pleasing forms; the grounding in place. It’s a rich show, one I’m looking forward to viewing several more time.

I own a couple of Marcus’ photos from Mexico, including one that headlined a show many years ago at Gallery Espresso. It shows a dog caught in relative focus as it sprints behind a vehicle in which the photographer is riding. It’s an exhilarating image, with the dog relishing the risky, futile chase, and the blur of the grainy road surface creating sharp vertical lines.

“Fallen Animals” is installed with particular care and beauty, with the large print of “Parish Line” along the back wall facing the door, and most of the rest of the photos arranged in clusters on the western wall facing Habersham Street. Prices aren’t listed on the wall, but the limited editions of 15 begin at $1200.

Marcus Kenney’s “Fallen Animals” is presented as part of SCAD’s deFine Art 2013. A reception will be held at Pinnacle Gallery on Tuesday, Feb. 19, from 6:30-8 p.m.

A few images in the show that were with the press release: