Music
Did Bob Dylan copy a blogger's picture for his art show?
by Jeremy Mersereau
January 20, 2017
One of Bob Dylan's Americana paintings is actually based on a photo of an English pier.
Much like another multi-talented artistic luminary, Nobel laureate Bob Dylan doesn’t just let making music satisfy his creativity – last year, he exhibited a collection of assorted American landscape drawings and paintings in London. At least, that was the plain, but according to one blogger and photographer, one painting in particular was based on a landscape a whole lot closer to London than anywhere in the USA.
One of Dylan’s paintings at the exhibit purported to show a deserted pier in Virginia:
Looks pretty legit, right? Well, blogger “Diamond Geezer” noticed that the painting was remarkably similar to a photograph he took in 2009 of a pier in Blackpool, England:
Yeah, that’s uh…pretty damning. “I received an email earlier in the week from an interested party asking me if I recognized the image. ‘It looks very much like a photo you took in Blackpool in 2009’, they said. And you know what, they’re right!” wrote the blogger. “The illumination’s different, but the alignment of the pier and lampposts is identical, as if the artist were standing precisely where I was standing six years earlier.”
The blogger notes this isn’t the only time Dylan has passed off one place for another in his visual works, or used a source photograph to make a painting, camera obscura-style. “A fan claimed that six of Dylan’s Asia Series’ 18 paintings were copied from photos in his Flickr stream, even incorporating the Photoshop edits made to the images.” Others have noticed that other Dylan paintings are actually reproductions of famous photographs and film stills. As Dylan himself noted in the exhbition’s catalogue, “in some cases my hand couldn’t do what my eye was perceiving. So I went to the camera obscura method.”
He doesn’t clarify that what his eye was perceiving, in this case, was a Flickr photo.
Yeah, artistic license and all, but passing off someone else’s image as completely your own, and as a completely different locale, goes a bit beyond the appropriate boundaries of creative expression.
[H/T INews]
