The reading “On the Rights of Molotov Man” examines the contrasting perspectives on appropriation and the art of context from two artists, Joy Garnett and Susan Meiselas. The piece begins with Garnett’s use of an image of ‘The Molotov Man’ as inspiration for a painting that she created. The painting received widespread recognition, however, Garnett’s unintended infringement on copyright laws evolved into a huge legal battle and escalated into a campaign called “Joywar”. The conflict that arose from Garnett’s accidental infringement of Meisalas’s image uncovered a battle of the arts between the rights to artistic freedom and the artist’s duty to respect the context that the image was taken in (aside from copyright laws). Garnett concludes her article asking “whether an individual should have the right to control the content of the [photograph] for all time?” Should Meiselas be able to ‘own’ the rights to this man’s struggle? Or should artists worldwide have the right to use inspiration from our world as they wish?
Meiselas uncovers her own side of the story by explaining the importance of context to her image, and how the decontextualization of the image diminished the importance of the Molotov Man himself, and the conflict that was occurring in Nicaragua, where the image was originally taken. An image that was symbolic of that uprising in Nicaragua was stripped of meaning once it was taken out of context, and how with digital innovation comes the increasing number of images that are dislocated and decontextualized. She encourages readers not to decontextualize images and for artists to reclaim the context that they have stripped from the image. She does not claim to own the image or the person in the image, but instead, she sees herself as a photographer to fight for the Molotov Man himself, to protect him from become a symbol for riots in general, and to retain the original meaning that he had to Nicaragua.
There really isn’t an answer for a conflict such as this, and although it is important to maintain the context of an image, it also takes away an artist’s creative abilities. The basis of art is to create something else out of a subject and to twist something conceptually, for the audience to see the world through the artist’s eyes. I think that the struggle between artistic freedom and respecting the subject of the images is a battle that will continue to escalate as it becomes increasingly easy to manipulate images as our world begins to digitalize.