Image rights and wrongs: architecture in the age of infinite reproduction

摘要

Last year, Italian architectural critic and curator Davide Tommaso Ferrando had a post censored by Facebook ostensibly for not owning the rights to an image he had shared on his news feed. He had found it (mArcTiDaily and credited the photographer. But as he confesses, 'I didn't really know who the copyright owner was: after all, in 10 years of social editing, photo ownership had never been a problem. So why did it suddenly seem to have become such a big deal?' He concludes that it was Facebook's engineers testing their ability to conform to a new EU directive designed to prevent online platforms from infringing copyright, by removing and preventing the publication of copyrighted text, images, audio and video. 'Provided that the directive gets fully applied', he writes, 'it will change not only the dynamics, but also the meaning of online communication, putting an end to this age of hyper-sharing.'Billions of images currently sluice with impunity through the conduits of the internet, where in a world of social editing by 'prosumers', issues of copyright and ownership have become conveniently elusive. It is a Faustian pact in many senses, as photographers benefit from exposure on high-traffic platforms, while personal editorial projects deftly sidestep the need to license imagery. So what happens when the hyper-sharing has to stop? When the devil of EU Directive 2019/790 comes round to collect?Nothing has exerted a greater influence on architecture's reception and circulation than the development of techniques for the mass reproduction of images, whether through print photography, or latterly, digital media. During the first half of the 20th century, the then new medium of photography gave the emerging currents of Modernism a powerful and radical means of visual expression. The camera had a profound effect on how architecture was imagined and constructed, and Modernist architecture lent itself to this dynamic new form of representation. Beyond this visual and intellectual reciprocity, Beatriz Oolomina argues that architecture effectively became 'modern' through being photographed and published. 'The conventional view portrays modern architecture as a high artistic practice established in opposition to mass culture and to everyday life', she writes. 'It is actually the emerging systems of communication that came to define 20th-century culture - the mass media - that are the true site within which modern architecture is produced and with which it directly engages.'