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This is my peace and the environment presentation in its entirety:

[View with PicLens]

From a series I’m doing for my presentation on Peace and the Environment.

I did some re-exporting of some of the landscapes I took in the Mojave desert two years ago. Black and White and lots of contrast.

Over the past few months we’ve seen more and more vacancies amongst the local retailers.  Our end of Oxford street has become populated with For Lease signs and there are fewer new shops opening up in the area.  The local realtors and landlords seem to be ignoring the fact that nobody can afford the exorbitant rents being charged in our area.

After months of watching this cycle of rents being raised, tenants moving out, new tenants moving in, rents being raised, tenants moving out, and so on we’ve finally lost one of the businesses the community loved and relied on.

Goodbye Greg, you’ll be missed, as will the best coffee in the Eastern Suburbs.

My last Kerb Coffee.

The team at Horizon Power were nice enough to give me a tour of the Carnarvon power plant.

Everyone I spoke to seemed to think I was crazy for wanting to see it, but a town of 7000 people that’s that isolated and needs a power plant seemed kind of interesting to me. The plant runs on both diesel and natural gas with 80% of power output coming from diesel.  Greg, the guy who showed me around was an electrician, and unfortunately I was informed that I couldn’t photograph anyone’s face.  Which kind of defeated the purpose for me, I thought it might generate some interesting images.  Luckily Greg was also at the race, in bright red shorts and thongs, as promised.  His wife Cathy was a Clerk of Course, not to be confused with the Clerk, of course as I’d initially understood her title to be.

Here are two ends of the very loud Natural Gas engines.  It was interesting that no flash was allowed.  There are UV sensors that shut the gas off immediately when there’s a spike in UV radiation.  Apparently the sensors aren’t as quick as the gas would be if there were a leak and I’d strobed it up.

Samantha Beeston is a textiles designer from the UK who recently won a cash prize for a bunch of work it turned out was just a little too close to the work by another Illustrator, Lauren Nassef.  The post was on You Thought We Wouldn’t Notice, but the better images to compare the work are on the blog Books By Its Cover.  The original artist seems to be fairly upset about it all, and rightfully so.

I was discussing it with a very local textiles designer and she reckons that a number of her classmates and even some of the local designers she’d  visited were doing similar things.  In her class they were told that as long as they changed 20% of the design, all’s well.  That seemed unbelievable, especially if you applied that rule to photography.  Another website I found stated that the general rule of thumb was a 30% alteration to the design made it original.  I’m going to start cropping Ansel’s prints by 30%.
In the above examples it is pretty obvious that Beeston felt that adding many individual elements of Nassef’s illustrations she was creating a new work of her own.  There is a pretty rich history of that sort of thing, Duchamp, his urinal and the Mona Lisa and that lady who inspires all the reappropriation of photographs debates in photography school (who’s name i can’t remember).  The difference between those pieces and what Beeston did, is I guess that she was trying to pass copied Design work off as Design work.  Duchamp used a print, a urinal and a pen to create his mixed media art.  Even the photography example used non-artistic, found photographs in her mixed media and photographic projects.  As in most artistic endeavours it is the intended purpose that is most important and Beeston’s intent for the designs were far too similar to the original designer’s intent.

Design and illustration have a strong connection to commercial art and thus infer certain rights as intellectual property as corporations attempt to protect their identities.  Our society acknowledges the inherent worth of ideas as a result.  I suppose this is also why Shepherd Fairey and the Obama image are so controversial, the AP owned that image and the look that Obama had on his face, and when Fairey appropriated the image for his illustrations, the AP felt it was inappropriately missing out on the income it is due.  The differences between the Obama/Fairey situation and the designers is that the media are not the same.  The photograph is a reflection of nature, of the environment, and external objects.  Beeston took something that only existed in the original artists mind, was born of her imagination and came to life by her hand and much more importantly, by society’s standards, both target a similar market.

I think the moral of the story is, don’t steal, you’re going to lose more on legal fees than you’ll ever make on un-original work.  Not to mention that there’s just too much inspiration in the world to both copying someone else’s vision.