The Face of an Angel
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Remember last year when I was visiting a number of small brewing companies and getting a photo of myself enjoying a flight of their products?
One of the places I visited around that time was Angel City Brewing near downtown Los Angeles, and my mother, of all people, got a photo of me anticipating a flight of their beers.
Late last week, I learned from my brother that LA Thrillist used that photo to illustrate their write-up on a click-baity, listicle about “43 Los Angeles Bars You Need To Drink In Before You Die.”
As some of you know, this is not the first time that someone has used one of my photos to illustrate a web article. Earlier this year, I learned that Curbed used one of “my” photos of the Four Seasons restaurant in the Phillip Johnson–designed Seagram Building. Similarly, DNA Info used one of my photos of Manhattanhenge from Long Island City after LIC became a hotspot for seeing the sun set in line with the Manhattan grid. And these are the ones I know about.
A quick web search revealed a few other uses of my photos, including:
- a photo from Heaven Hill Distillery to illustrate a weekend roundup in Ottawa, including the first-ever Ottawa Bourbon Week, by Amanda Armstrong.
- A not–very-good photo of Tom Moore Distillery to illustrate that the very best thing to do in Kentucky is to visit bourbon distilleries on the Bourbon Trail, by Matt Meltzer.
- the same photo of LIC Manhattanhenge DNA Info used for a slideshow at Time Out New York, by Nick Leftley, and again to illustrate the twenty-five things to do in NYC during the week of August 31, 2015, by David Goldberg.
Keep in mind, there’s nothing specifically improper about these uses. I made all of those photos available under a specific Creative Commons license allowing anyone to use my work as long as it is attributed and not used for a commercial purpose. Nonetheless, it would have been nice to receive an email or a comment on the Flickr page alerting me to the appropriating of my work: something like, “Hey dude, we used for your photo for an article on a ‘bucket list’ of awesome bars in Los Angeles. Hope you check it out.”
But at least it’s nice knowing that my photos might bring people to some interesting places in downtown Los Angeles and midtown Manhattan, as well as Queens and Kentucky.