Rock Photo Credits & the Joey Punk Meme

As long as I've been into rock and roll I've been obsessed with viewing and accumulating photos of my favorite rock stars. With today's technology and the way things are shared and spread it makes it often times difficult to identify and credit the original photographer. As an artist myself, and as someone who has had their work used without permission, I empathize with fellow creators. I have a solid commitment to keeping in links and watermarks in images. I can't imagine purposefully taking them out or purposefully un-crediting the original artist. That's just something I wouldn't do. The golden rule, and all that.

With all honesty I have posted my share of un-credited photos, only because I didn't know or couldn't find who took the photograph. If I know, or once I find out, I will edit and share this information. As the internet gets more saturated it becomes harder and harder to know who did what. I'm just a regular rock artist and I've had some of my own creations ripped off or with links cut out of graphics. I originally posted the graphic on my facebook page Bite-the-dust.com: Rock & Roll Resurrection. The meme went viral, it was shared by the Ramones official page, Joey Ramone's official page, and many others.

In Summer of 2014 I was contacted by Pat Blashill, the original photographer of the black and white Joey Ramone picture I turned into a meme. At first he was understandably upset with me, but once we chatted we were able to clear the air. I sincerely apologized, and made sure my page members knew who took the photo. I never claimed to of taken the photo, by the way, I just used the graphic paired up with my favorite Joey Ramone quote to spread my Ramones love.

The instance certainly made me more careful though, and pushed me to try to use my own photos for memes. Since it would be a picture I took... just a picture, I'm no photographer I'm not using someone else's work and can skip that potential issue all together. Since then I have been working even harder to make sure I list photo credits. I love rock photographers and adore their work, so I would never want to do anything but promote them, I'd never intentionally discredit.

Below is the old version of the meme I made and the new one with photo credit:

I urge you guys to check out Pat's website for more of his work!

Comments

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