Music Photographers Unite To Battle Stupidity in 1983
Things were going just fine for us in the ‘70s. We shot whole shows and placed the best of those photos in dozens of magazines.
We were quite proud of our work………until bands’ managements and publicists decided to screw it all up by placing new (and quite unwanted) restrictions on us and our work.
“You can only shoot the first 3 songs (uhhhh……..the lighting is always better late in the show and sometimes special guests show up then). I’ve had more than one publicist call me up the day after a special guest joined her artist onstage either late in the show or during encores.
“I’d like to see your shots of the two of them together”.
“No-can-do, dumbbell, you kicked us out after 3 songs!”
So much history was being lost because of this not-well-thought-out rule. I always used this to try to get them to drop their idiotic dictum:
“If the 3-song limit was in effect at 1967’s Monterey Pop, we’d have no photos of Jimi Hendrix burning his guitar.”
“Also, we all supply many magazines with pictures………..we can’t do that with only 3 songs-worth of photos, so we have to take many more photos during those 3 songs to make up for it and they’re not always good enough images that we would never normally take during a whole show. You’re hurting the image of the artist that you supposedly care about”.
I guess that made too much sense to change anything.
Other counter-productive rules soon followed:
“No flash!” Well then, how about providing sufficient lighting during the show? If you take away something that critical to good photography, you have to replace it with something equal (or better).
Most moronic use of the No-Flash rule: I photographed Stevie Wonder one night and was told I couldn’t use my flash! “Why? Is it gonna make him more blind?”
Really dopey rule: we have to send all of our work to the band’s management company so some secretary can look at them and say, “Ooooo, that’s cute” or “Ewww, that’s icky” and forbid us to use whatever they rejected. I think photographers know which shots are their best work. Besides – we’re in competition with each other………….we HAVE to provide only the best images or we’ll never be paid.
Next idiotic rule: We’re only allowed to use ONE photo in ONE magazine until the end of the calendar year. Tough to do if you shoot a show in December and the management company that’s censoring your photos is taking their sweet time returning your property.
One management (I forget which one) sent my slides back REALLY late. Their excuse? “We found your slides under a seat cushion on the tour bus”. Nice to know they take such great care of our property. That was the last time I ever sent my slides in for approval.
And that’s another thing…………it IS our property. We own the copyright and the law lets us do what we want with them editorially.
Some of the bands required us to sign very restrictive contracts before we could shoot a show and a lot of what was in them was patently illegal.
We were never provided with a contract copy to read in advance – otherwise, I might have just stayed home rather than sign any of these make-believe documents.
I still have a copy of one of the worst contracts I’ve ever encountered. It’s from 1981 and it was from a band I liked (Van Halen). I was not told about this contract beforehand and drove through two states to be presented with this “approval letter” and told to sign it if I wanted to shoot the show.
I’ve had a copyright lawyer since the late ‘70s. He told me about little ways to get around these restrictions and one BIG way: since all of these clauses were illegal and would never hold up in court, he suggested that we subtly violate them and see if anyone gets sued.
If that happened, we’d all $upport the defendant because these rules would all be exposed in court as illegal and we’d never have to deal with them again.
So we did little things to get their attention, such as writing a small “not” in front of verbs on the contract that ordered us to do something. Personally, I had many 1981 VH pictures published in many magazines over many years – three different violations! – I must be in big trouble! But I never heard a peep from anybody.
Related – I just found something in the Van Halen folder that I wrote up back then:
We were practically begging these managements to sue one of us, but no matter how much we violated the contacts, no one ever got sued. That’s probably a smart move by the managements, because they knew that everything they wrote would be declared illegal and they would never be able to bother any photographer now or in the future.
So – after reading the contract, I noticed that one sentence started off by saying, “…since it’s impossible to calculate the damages which a breach by me would cause you…”, but by the end of that sentence, it said that, “…you shall be entitled to…one hundred thousand dollars”. So what was impossible at the beginning of the sentence was suddenly possible at the end of it?
I signed the contract because it said “…you shall be entitled…” It didn’t say from whom! 44 years later, I guess I’m in the clear.
Here’s that horrible contract:
So, since we figured out that they were vulnerable, we decided to cement that by forming an organization. Some of us – myself included – got together and wrote up our manifesto and sent it to the music industry’s leading trade publication, Billboard magazine:
Much to our surprise and delight, the whole thing was published on their editorial page for the entire industry to see:
Finding this again is what drove me to make this post.
That was our impetus to form AMPS – the American Music Photographers Society. My copyright lawyer became our attorney and nobody messed with us after that.
I do think that the 3-song limit is now pretty much ingrained in the industry, but the stupid stuff pretty much got the boot (I hope).
It felt good to have written a healthy chunk of that Billboard piece and maybe helped out our successors a bit, but I have almost no connection to any of that anymore….. except I still do get calls for images of certain performers for things like online documentaries (Bon Jovi, Cyndi Lauper), the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony catalogs and my recent favorite – the Christie’s auction catalog for their sale of Jeff Beck’s guitars.
One more late find – a letter from VH management:
My 3 B&W contact sheets contained 91 images and they approved SEVEN of them? That means they rejected 92.3% of them.
Good thing that as the copyright holder, I have the final approval of what gets used and it was a LOT more than 7.7%.
And I don’t send ANYBODY original slides unless there is substantial money already promised as a result of viewing low-res copies submitted to lead to publication of the originals.
As for duplicate slides, they made no offer to pay for all that duplication, so they got nothing – not even a reply.
Lots of these images were published for years without any complaint from the VH people, so I guess my approval did a much better job than theirs would have.
Though I haven’t been active in the business for over 3 decades, I’m still not aware of any music photographer having been sued for violating any of the ridiculous “rules”.
Until I hear otherwise, I’ll consider that a victory for all of us – past and present.
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