What Was an Author?

Desktop Arenas: Magazine Pieces and the Professions of the Neo-Avant-Garde

“…Barthes, for his part, was out of step." 60 This tentative engagement plays out over the issue's table of contents, where O'Doherty identifies some of the contributions as belonging to recognizable genres, such as "poetry," "music," or "film," and others to the more ambiguous categories of "data" and "documents." The latter terms belong to the improvised lexicon of a desktop arena, a pair of catchalls for a wide range of artistic, scientific, and administrative modes of organizing information.…”

The Commercial Street Photographer: The Right to the Street and the Droit à l’Image in Post-1945 France

“…French law only extended it to photographs in 1957 and then only for those of an ‘artistic or documentary’ nature (see Gendreau, 1999). Until then, courts did often rule in favor of photographers’ ownership of their images, but only if they could prove that the work was artistic rather than industrial (see McCauley, 2008; Nesbit, 1987). Professional photographers’ battle for the droit d’auteur helps, in part, to explain their virulent reaction to photofilmeurs.…”