Bill Eppridge

My image (at top), someone else’s art: The Mysterious Allure of Rural America, by Deborah Faye Lawrence.

Lately some of my photographs have been showing up in unlikely places on the internet, and in works by others. Life.com made a business decision to put the entire picture collection online and this has led to misuse and theft along with legitimate licensed uses of the photographs.

A case in point is a famous photograph that I took of the Barstow to Vegas motorcycle race in 1971 (see below). I shot the photograph from a helicopter at the start of this legendary race. It’s been appropriated by artist Deborah Faye Lawrence in her work titled, “The Mysterious Allure of Rural America,” 2008. My photograph is more than one-third of her work which she describes as “acrylic, collage, varnish on board.” She is working in the style of Richard Prince who famously appropriated the work of photographers who shot the Marlboro cigarette advertisements. Both Prince and Lawrence copied the works as their own, without attribution.

My photograph: Barstow to Vegas Motorcycle Race, 1971.

Lawrence’s appropriation of my work is a meaningless rip-off. It’s a naive juxtaposition between cliched images in her work, and what she wants the viewer to believe about rural life and it’s dark side. I don’t see a definitive statement, nor do I see where my photograph relates to any other image in her artwork except to enhance the bottom two-thirds of her work. Remove my photograph and the composition has no impact. The artist used my work to make her collaged work look better.

The Barstow to Vegas photograph was shot in 1971, in the Nevada desert, in the 20th century. I risked my life many times to make photographs — in this case I was standing on the skid outside a helicopter at 500 feet. Seeing my work stolen in this manner just flat-out offends me because the artist used something that she didn’t earn or create for her own benefit.

According to her website, Hayes is widely known as a collagist, and claims to be working in the same spirit and style as Romare Beardon and Max Ernst. She says, “I have been using found imagery and text in my artwork for a long time.” On close examination of both Beardon and Ernst’s works, they did not appropriate other works in this manner, and their work was far more original. And, in all likelihood, she ‘found’ my work on the internet.