“I hate bullies”, Lynn Goldsmith explained via Zoom on a Saturday morning why, at the age of 75 and with more than five decades of career, she faced a complex and expensive legal process, which exposed her in the media and would be decisive in the worldwide discussion of Copyright.
I confess that I was anxious and very nervous to talk to her, as not only is she a legend in photography, on TV, in music, and in art in general. She is a genius in the most correct use of the word. Currently, her photos are highlighted in the exhibition Tina Turner: A Journey to the Future, which is on display at the Museum of Image and Sound, in São Paulo. Album covers and iconic images by Carly Simon, The B-52’s, The Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Kiss, Blondie, Sting, Madonna, Michael Jackson, and Prince, in fact virtually every rock and music legend pop of the last 30 years, were made by Lynn. I’m sure that when you google it, you’ll be blown away if you don’t already know your work. Director of shows, documentaries, short films, music (in the 80s she was successful under the code name of Will Powers, with video material and music talking about mental health), and author of books, there is nothing that Lynn has not done and more, she has done before everyone.
Her name was recently highlighted due to the long legal battle that was the kickoff of our conversation and it is a fight that marks an important victory in the field of copyright. A photo of him of the elusive Prince, taken in the early 1980s when he was still on the rise, was the basis of a magazine piece by Andy Warhol in 1984. The problem only arose when Warhol’s print – the Orange Prince – was misused without Lynn’s authorization or credit, in 2016, which triggered a lawsuit against her (amazingly!), the author of the original photo, filed by the Warhol Foundation who did not like it when she approached them asking about credits and licensing. Almost seven years later, the Supreme Court of Justice in the United States definitively decided the matter in favor of Lynn Goldsmith, determining that there was no “fair use” of the image, as claimed by the Foundation. The decision, which is no longer subject to appeal, becomes an important milestone for copyright protection in several creative industries because it establishes a legal framework for new works based on existing material, whether for commercial or non-commercial use.
Lynn, always active and creative, was quick to accept the exclusive chat with CLAUDIA (though yours truly, here at MiscelAna) and we talked about everything: from professional pioneering to having invented the selfie stick, without forgetting, of course, the great victory with and for Prince.
MISCELANA/CLAUDIA: First of all, I have to confess that I am thrilled to be speaking with you. So many images that marked my cultural formation were made by you and it is a privilege to have the opportunity to be with you.
LYNN: I’m so grateful that whatever I did or said had a positive effect on you. Not just a great effect, but you know all my work is about how we all have the talent to tap into and so it’s really great that you’re using yours, writing and interviewing. So it’s a real gift for me to have had some kind of influence.
MISCELANA/CLAUDIA: And when I think of Lynn Goldsmith, the word pioneer could not have been the best translation, because your vision, your work, and your commitment were always ahead of everyone. On any subject!
LYNN: Fortunately, a little too far. (laughter). The clearest example of that was around 2004. I made a photo stick because I thought it was really important, especially for people who travel with their families or whatever, to be able to take pictures of themselves with their families. And I went to companies that we patented, we did samples, I went to companies for over 6 years, they turned me down until I finally said ‘I don’t want my life to be a stick’. And people had seen my stick, which is known today as the selfie stick, and in 2014 it was voted invention of the year, you know, but at that time I had already sold the patent to pay my expenses. So while I take a lot of pride and joy in wanting to make things that I think are groundbreaking, all I do is take things that already exist and create sort of a new way of looking at them and using them. That’s how I think about it and being a pioneer, there are often those who usually arrive too soon. At times, it was, you know, my destiny.
MISCELANA/CLAUDIA: In almost everything we look at in your trajectory, you were the first in everything: the first female director, the youngest, and also anticipating discussions about mental health about 40 years of becoming an agenda. And just to start with, when did music and photography come into your life?
LYNN: Photography came about because my father was an amateur photographer and filmmaker. He was an inventor and engineer and to spend time with my father, because my parents were divorced when I was 4 years old, I would accompany him when he took pictures and then we would go to the dark room. So it was a way for a little girl to bond with her dad but also to experience from a very young age how art can be like magic because in the dark the pictures would appear in different trays and I think I associated all of that with love. As for the music, it was because around the same time, in the 1950s, I was sent to summer camp and when I cried at night, the counselor would take me to a swing and sing to me. We were always in the swing and I felt love again. So the effects of art and photography and music really made me feel connected to the world, to myself, you know, not so scared, scared. And it’s not just photography, it’s visual, it’s making images. Since my sister knew how to draw from an early age, even without any classes she started painting so I didn’t paint until later in life because I felt it was her domain. It was like picking tools from her. (laughter).
MISCELANA/CLAUDIA: And that’s how your desire to work with Art was born?
LYNN: Well, first of all, nothing in life for anyone is like a straight line from A to B. It’s crooked, things happen. I’ve always taken pictures and it didn’t start with concerts or anything like that. I took pictures of my dolls, but I never thought it would be a way to earn a living. The camera or music has always been a tool to express my ideas. My photography career even started years later, when I was directing a television program and wanted to do something that was more documentary. The station was doing a special with the band Grand Funk Railroad, and that’s a much longer story, but I met them and I had an idea. They were at the top of the FM radio charts at the time, but they wanted to be on all of them (Billboard, etc.) and I offered to work for free until they got what they wanted. Their manager thought this would never happen and so he let me do what I wanted. Soon they had a number-one single on all charts. Photography started because one of the strategies to put Grand Funk in magazines was to put them in magazines in addition to music magazines. For example, I took Mark Farner [band vocalist] to donate blood and I took the photos that were published in a national magazine, not just a specialized one. And also since I was the director of the TV special, I went to the shows and did the photos to create the storyboard and to be ready for the guitar solo or whatever it was. And so it began, but I was never just a photographer. I am ready and willing to use any tool to manifest an idea.
MISCELANA/CLAUDIA: Not to mention the fact that it wasn’t common for women to do what you did from an early age.
LYNN: I think it’s all about how you think and I never thought that being a woman would hold me back from anything. I knew being funny helped people want me around, so I worked on that. But she also knew how people look at you has an effect: whether you’re a man or a woman, stylish or not, fat or thin. But it’s just facts and I kind of get away from that when I say to myself, “OK, I have this and this and this about me that I know affects other people,” but I can’t change my gender. I’m lucky because everything has advantages and disadvantages. I didn’t think I was beautiful, but I knew I was attractive. And when you know you’re attractive or feel attractive, people are attracted to you. There are many people who don’t feel this way and who are actually attractive.
MISCELANA/CLAUDIA: And what else do people ask about your trajectory?
LYNN: I had already worked at Electra Records in publicity and marketing when Grand Funk came into my life, and of the many books I’ve written, the ones that focus on rock’n’roll are usually the photography ones, especially “Rock’n’roll”. ‘roll Stories’ which has the answers to ‘how did you manage to photograph Bob Dylan? “How did you get on the road with the Rolling Stones?” [laughter]
[OBS: Here’s the tip: the book has a Portuguese translation and was released in Brazil.]
MISCELANA/CLAUDIA: Which brings us to Prince’s photo and the studio portraits you’ve done. But before getting to the legal issue: what is the secret of a good portrait?
LYNN: The more research you do about who the person is, where they come from, where they were, especially when they were teenagers, it helps to create an environment for the shoot that they can feel really comfortable in. Any really good portrait photographer is expected to be good at becoming someone’s new best friend in about 30 seconds. But that comes from research and preparing yourself with certain ideas in your mind about what you want to manifest to other people, but being open.
MISCELANA/CLAUDIA: With digital cameras, everyone kind of feels able to feel a bit like an artist, doesn’t it?
LYNN: We live in a much more sophisticated visual world today, quite different from the one I grew up in in the ’60s. When you look at the way streaming television shows are filmed now, it didn’t look that way in the ’50s and ’60s. a much more educated look and why the cell phone has made photography so democratic. An art form, to which everyone has access at all times. And the fact that cameras can do a lot of auto-tuning things that you previously had to know in your head and do a certain kind of math has allowed a lot of people to be able to take photographs and some even as good as those of people who have spent a lot of time. decades working in that particular craft [photography] and I’m glad I did. The more visuals in the world are really powerful, the way people put things together, whether it’s the colors, the shapes, the emotion because it shows that we’re moving forward.
MISCELANA/CLAUDIA: Something very clear throughout your career was your awareness and fight for copyright, another field in which you were a pioneer. In the case of Photographic Art, does it still end up generating doubts that should already be clearer?
LYNN: The change started when with Polaroid that really made people go, ‘Oh, you just press a button, and boom, you have a picture!’ I felt that copyright was so important because in anything an artist does, there are costs involved and you can really struggle. There were days when I wouldn’t eat unless someone took me out to dinner. You really should be able to generate income so that you can fund other things that you do. For example, I could never have made the offer to Grand Funk to work for free if I didn’t already have financial backing before that. When I started doing celebrity portraits it was a means of generating income. I knew where I wanted to go because when I started photographing, mainly musicians, nobody had a budget: neither the record company nor the magazines. Hair, make-up, style, it all costs money. Owning a studio costs money. Equipment costs money. Having an assistant costs money. So let’s say a magazine paid you $300.00. OK, that didn’t cover the cost. You had to be able to sell that photo to more than one publication in order to pay back the money you put into it. I was always investing in myself because I believed that I would create good work and I believed that it would pay for itself and it should reward me. I also made a lot of pictures that I kept in the drawer and waited until it was ready. I painted pictures, drew them, but I didn’t want to show them. It didn’t make sense to show why magazines didn’t publish things like that at the time.
MISCELANA/CLAUDIA: When did you start to change?
LYNN: The door to a career as an advertising photographer opened in the 1990s when advertising wanted editorial photographers. Even Art photographers. Nobody really thought that Cindy Sherman would shoot for a magazine or Nan Goldin. Nowadays these people are hired by a magazine, but at that time [still in the 1980s] I was a pioneer for investing in the hair that composes the styling. Now no big star photo shoot is done without the makeup artist they want to work with, etc. And in fact, there was resistance as well from artists because at that time it could still mean that you really don’t have integrity as a musician if you let somebody change, you know? All that has changed nowadays.
MISCELANA/CLAUDIA: And in this work the copyright is clear, isn’t it?
LYNN: What will always be true is that because of copyright laws, people who take risks, as I did, to do work, must be protected. There’s a lot of work in the public domain – either because it’s over 75 years old or because the person hasn’t registered it – and it’s images that are free for people to use. When this is not the case, you ask the person who created it for permission. Because the other thing is in regards to the [Andy] Warhol situation or any situation where you’re an artist who wants to use my image whether it’s a celebrity or not. I may not like your work. I may not want this done to my image. I should have the option of that! Or let’s say it’s a job I planned to do at some point. Or I don’t want competition for my own work that I’ve created. And you know what? What really bothers me about the Warhol case is particularly the Supreme Court justice who said it would kill creativity. On the contrary! Not having a copyright law would kill creativity. I am not against appropriation. I am not against artists being inspired by art, but by direct use of a line as clear and evident as in the Warhol Prince series, even if, if you look at the court documents you will only see black and white drawings that are placed on tracing paper over my photo. Here it is. So we call it derivative work. There are artists that I love, Rauschenberg started appropriation. But I do not. I think appropriation is different from taking something, making it the body of it. So the excuse they used at the Warhol Foundation is that he [Andy Warhol] was making them [celebrities] icons. He was doing this homage to fame and that I just photograph people as they are. It’s like I don’t have the same job as Andy. Andy and I had the same job. We both worked for magazines, we both did private commissions, and we were both in galleries. Yes, Andy has become, you know, a household name in the art world. That was the journey he took, that’s what he called himself, but that doesn’t validate his fame, it doesn’t validate that he transformed images. If that were true, then take the black and white film Casablanca and give it to Andy to take to a color technician and release it as ‘Andy Warhol’s Casablanca‘. He would own the copyright and get all the money. It would never happen! The film industry would go crazy. Well, it’s very similar. He also had black and white drawings and claimed them as his own. [the original photo of the singer Prince, taken in 1981 by Lynn, was in black and white, one of the arguments used by the Warhol Foundation to highlight the differences between the works].
MISCELANA/CLAUDIA: You and Andy Warhol knew each other. If he were still alive, do you believe that all this wear and tear and discussion would have been avoided?
LYNN: Had Andy been alive, I really think it would have been different because he settled over 14 lawsuits before he died with artists who came up to him and said ‘You took my work’. That’s why Gerard Malanga gave Andy a camera because he said, ‘You’re being sued all the time. Take your own pictures. That’s when Andy exploded, he had his Polaroid and he started taking pictures.
MISCELANA/CLAUDIA: I can’t help but think how symbolic it was that the judicial decision to protect your copyright was precise with an image of Prince, who fought until his death against the piracy of his Art, preventing its use on social networks or any other platform that didn’t pay you for the use…
LYNN: You were the only person who pointed that out and I feel the same way. It’s unbelievable that more people haven’t because his fight has been so public. People don’t address it, just as they don’t address that Prince himself felt this way about copyright. And I’m so glad that finally, someone said it. It was not me! [laughter]
MISCELANA/CLAUDIA: Was that what led you to face the long and arduous legal process?
LYNN: When we’re working in this genre of portraits, you usually have agreements, whether they’re good faith agreements or written agreements that you’re not going to do a lot of things and you know you’re going to have to ask their permission if you’re going to do this or that, so your career in this field is based on confidence. Artists have to be able to trust you. So whether it’s Andy or Joe Blow, when the subject sees something different with your image they might think the photographer gave them the right to do it and they won’t work with you anymore. You can destroy someone’s career. But here it was worse, it was an act of bullying and if we don’t stand up to bullying, just like if we don’t stand up for our rights, it spreads like a disease.
MISCELANA/CLAUDIA: How did it all start?
LYNN: The Warhol Foundation sued me first with the so-called preventive action. First, they released information that I tried to extort them, but all I did was call and send the 1984 Vanity Fair invoice, which licensed the photo for single use in a print publication with my credit. At the time, in 1984, the licensed photo went to an illustrator – who I didn’t know who it was – and since it was published when I was in Europe promoting and performing as Will Powers, I never paid attention until Prince died. In 2016 I saw the cover of a Vanity Fair commemorative issue, and I thought, ‘It looks like my picture’. I did the research and saw that it was used before in a 1984 magazine article that showed my credit. So I went to my files and found my invoice, which I keep because they are rights licenses. I pull out my black and white files, find the photo, scan it, and send it with the invoice to Mike Herman at the Warhol Foundation. And I said, ‘Mike, this is my image of Prince and it’s licensed for this. I’d like to talk to you about how we can resolve this. So can you please show this to the people over there [at Vanity Fair]’. And then what did he do? He comes back to me and says, what do you want? And I said, well, I couldn’t say what I want. I don’t know how many licenses you gave. You could make a list and then we can talk about it and then we can discuss a retroactive license. On Monday the phone rang and it was reporters from the New York Post wanting me to comment on the lawsuit that had been filed against me in federal court, which is a different color picture, and saying I tried to extort them. I never asked for a dime. I asked for a list.
MISCELANA/CLAUDIA: And how was your reaction?
LYNN: When you get sued, you hire a lawyer to face it in the same capacity as the Warhol Foundation lawyer, you need a good lawyer, which is very expensive. And they then offered me $15,000 to drop the lawsuit [initiated by them], but I would have to give up my copyright so I wouldn’t have to deal with the costs of continuing to fight in court. They warned: ‘because we will continue to appeal, whatever the decision, until the Supreme Court’. I had heard of other big companies scaring off a lot of photographers. It’s not just the legal cost, but also the emotional drain of going through the entire court system. Most artists don’t want to deal with that. But I license my work. I sell in galleries. Maybe one day I want to paint that picture of Prince. They claimed that although they had seen the Vanity Fair license, that it was a public-domain publicity photo. First, it wasn’t. But if I license it for advertising, the licenses always say it’s for one year of use only. For example, if the artist I photographed is releasing a new album and needs publicity photos, within that license, I understand the connection but still have to put my name on the publicity.
MISCELANA/CLAUDIA: Now the decision of the Supreme cannot be appealed. How is it?
LYNN: My initiative was never to take [Andy Warhol’s works with his picture of Prince] out of museums, okay? I do not intend to undo Andy’s work in any way. I loved Andy. There’s a lot in his work that really changed the art world. But one thing is fans are posting on Instagram, I want them to tag me, credit me, and send it back to me, with my Lynn Goldsmith tag. They’re not after financial gain, it’s a love festival. What is not acceptable is when you put the image on products to sell.
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