Digital BW, The Print

Actually, Paul, I believe photographs in the public domain can be sold 
by you and me.  I'm not a lawyer, but a few years ago I did some 
research,
and downloaded some FSA photos for me to sell. Some of the FSA shots, 
like Arthur Rothstein's Dust Bowl photo, were removed from the public 
domain
by the photographers (not sure how they did that), but the vast 
majority are available.  Getting ahold of a high resolution file is 
more difficult, because
most of them were not scanned  high res. I seem to remember reading 
that the work from negatives larger than 35 mm was copied to 35mm, and 
then scanned. You can imagine how poor a lot of them are!

Clay Price

On Dec 22, 2005 : "Paul Roark wrote:
>
>> There is a company in New Mexico or Arizona (can't find link right
>> now) that is printing these and many more from the Library's
>> collection and selling them, framed or unframed. They must have made
>> a deal with them, I would think you or I could NOT do the same even
>> though the images are in "public domain".

There was a link to the usage terms somewhere on the site. It seems 
that most of these images are for personal use, and not really 
intended for profit. But it also said the images taken while under 
contract with the government (which was most of them) were the 
property of the government (not the photographer), and that the 
government can not hold a copyright on those (any) images. Yes 
slightly confusing.

> Actually, Paul, I believe photographs in the public domain 
> can be sold by you and me.  I'm not a lawyer, but a few years 
> ago I did some research, and downloaded some FSA photos for 
> me to sell. Some of the FSA shots, like Arthur Rothstein's 
> Dust Bowl photo, were removed from the public domain by the 
> photographers (not sure how they did that), but the vast 
> majority are available.  Getting ahold of a high resolution 
> file is more difficult, because most of them were not scanned 
>  high res. I seem to remember reading that the work from 
> negatives larger than 35 mm was copied to 35mm, and then 
> scanned. You can imagine how poor a lot of them are!
> 
> Clay Price

	The "Migrant Mother" I downloaded was a grayscale 55mb tif, and
appears to be a scan of the LF neg.  I just resized to 8x10, sharpened in PK
Sharpener, touched up the contrast a little and printed on Innova natural
white (Epson 2200/IP).  It looks great, better than my recollection of the
museum prints.  I'm pretty sure it is a scan of the original or copy neg
because, aside from the rebate border, the dust hasn't been retouched and
the thumb hasn't been airbrushed out as in the gallery prints.  Whatever, it
is a very interesting (humbling)experience to print these images.

Ken

--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, "Greg" 
<dfaprinting@y...> wrote:
>
> There was a link to the usage terms somewhere on the site. It seems 
> that most of these images are for personal use, and not really 
> intended for profit. But it also said the images taken while under 
> contract with the government (which was most of them) were the 
> property of the government (not the photographer), and that the 
> government can not hold a copyright on those (any) images. Yes 
> slightly confusing.
>
followup:
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/fsahtml/fares.html
http://www.loc.gov/homepage/legal.html