Born: 1948, United States
Died: NA
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women creator Allison Tyra’s book Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work.
In arts law, the tenet of “fair use” is an exception to copyright—for example, if someone is parodying or critiquing a work, they may reprint text or share an image or clip of the work, or produce their own version. Creating a different artwork using the original is generally considered fair use, if the work is substantially different from the original. Andy Warhol is perhaps the most significant example of an artist whose entire, successful career was based on replicating other people’s images, including his Marilyn Diptych (using 50 publicity photos from Marilyn Monroe’s 1953 film Niagara).
Photographer Lynn Goldsmith fought her copyright claim against Warhol’s estate (the Andy Warhol Foundation) all the way to the Supreme Court. Goldsmith photographed the biggest names in rock ‘n’ roll in the 1980s, including a 1981 photoshoot with Prince before he became a legend. She later licensed the image to Vanity Fair for a 1984 issue of the magazine. Without her knowledge, Warhol later produced the “Prince Series” of images based on her photo, without crediting her in any way. She only found out in 2016, when Vanity Fair published one of the series’s images. Patricia Caufield also sued Warhol for using her photograph of hibiscus flowers as the subject of his Flowers series, while civil rights photographer Charles Moore sued him for using photographs that Moore published in Life as the basis for his Race Riot painting, and Fred Ward sued over use of his photograph of a grieving Jacqueline Kennedy. All three settled with Warhol out of court, but more legal battles arose after Warhol’s 1987 death. Because such court cases are often subjective, based on the personal opinions of judges rather than hard facts, it is all too easy for a well-known artist to get away with stealing others’ work. But in a “landmark ruling,” the U.S. Supreme Court sided with Goldsmith in 2023, with Justice Sonia Sotomayor writing, “Goldsmith’s original works, like those of other photographers, are entitled to copyright protection, even against famous artists.”