Back when I wrote this post, it was obvious to me that the Luke Ravenstahl Campaign had seriously screwed up by branding their campaign website with the same image that is used to brand the City’s Redd Up Campaign (and all things garbage collections-related).
Other blogs such as The Burgh Report and The People’s Republic of Pittsburgh picked up on the story and found many City-owned images being used on the Ravenstahl Campaign site. The Post-Gazette’s Early Returns column and the Tribune-Review got in on the action questioning the Mayor’s office and the Ravenstahl Campaign on the issue. The answer they got was that the campaign had asked folks to send in their favorite photos of Luke and that any pictures which may have been from the city’s web site (taken by City employees on City time) were taken down. But what still remains on every page of the campaign site is the near iconic photo of Ravenstahl with his hands on his hips that has become ubiquitous on official City mailings and BILLBOARDS.
How can that be?
Neither the P-G or the Trib goes into details on why that photo remains (the Admiral has a nice post on that here).
The Ravenstahl Camp chose to answer any question by carefully and narrowly framing it thusly:
"The fundamental issue was, were any of our pictures sourced from the city Web site," said Ravenstahl campaign manager Damon Andrews.That doesn’t really address the hands-on-hips picture. Cute, huh?
And, how did the Ravenstahl Administration tackle the issue? The only clue may be this comment by Ravenstahl spokesman Dick Skrinjar:
Skrinjar said some of the pictures were taken by professional photographers and donated to Ravenstahl.Hmmm…”Donated” to Ravenstahl and not the City?
I’m a little confused here.
Is Skrinjar claiming that a photograph was commissioned by the City to be taken by a professional photographer and the City doesn’t own the photograph?
If the City doesn’t own it, what are the terms of usage for the photograph?
Did the City get it on a one usage basis, say, for the billboards and then has to pay more each time it’s used when
Or did the City get unlimited usage but the photographer can also donate it to whomever he/she wants to? That would be stupid as the photographer, say, could put out T-shirts and coffee mugs with the image on it, but with a slogan like “Pittsburgh sucks.” Or someone could come along, say the City of Cleveland, and offer the photographer lots of money for the photograph and they could use that image for all sorts of dastardly uses. That would be embarrassing and stupid.
Or, was it never bought by the City/donated to the City, but it was donated personally to Ravenstahl and he merely allows the City to use it for official business. What kind of Mayor (interim or otherwise) would make a deal as stupid and bad for the City as that?
Hey, maybe the City owns it, but the photographer, being a nice guy/gal, gave a souvenir 8 x 10 glossy to Ravenstahl and that has translated in Luke’s mind to a “donation” to him of the picture that he could use for whatever he likes. That sure sounds stupid or I’m looking for another word here, but all I can come up with is “retarded.”
So again, I got to ask:
Who owns this image?
What are the terms of its usage?
Can it be donated to just anyone?
How can it be that it can appear both on official City documents and billboards AND on the Ravenstahl Campaign site?
I’m just one, still ill, largely house-bound woman with a dying PC and a blog that I can barely access who has no real clout. I’m not a reporter for a large daily newspaper of a large American city.
All I know is that someone needs to nail some real answers down and they haven’t yet.
Any takers?
4 comments:
I'll have more on this later today.
--The Burgher
Just about to post more on this myself.
You're making too much of the hands-on-the-hips photo. That photo was taken by a professional photographer from the South Side who made an in-kind donation of the photo to Luke Ravenstahl. Since it's his, Ravenstahl can use the picture however he wants, just as you (bloggers) can legally use any photos on the city's Web site. The real issue here is whether or not city employees took photos of Ravenstahl on city time and then gave them to the campaign to use. That's against the law, and that's the real issue. Unfortunately, it's impossible to prove. Fortunately, raising the question is enough to raise doubt about the administration's responses in most people's minds.
Not sure how you read this post without seeing this one where the issue of who took the photo was addressed.
I would suggest you also check out the comments to the above linked post as well as some of the postings at the Admiral's.
There's still many questions raised by the hands-on-the-hips photo including:
- Did Luke report the photo session as an in kind contribution? He valued the session at $1,500.00.
- If Luke is using this as his official campaign photo, that certainly makes all the paid-by-the-city mailings of this photo look a hell of a lot more like campaign lit which would make those mailings illegal.
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