A beautiful old photo for sale (obviously without the flowers in the image)

(This essay was originally written in Ukrainian for Support Your Art.)

It all started with Polish colonies. Several years ago, I was doing animated collages for a book about interwar Polish colonial ambitions and needed old photos for them. Many old photos. So many, in fact, that quite soon I ran out of time and money to buy them from flea markets and had to turn towards looking for images on the Internet. The most useful resource turned out to be online auctions where I could search by keywords among thousands of old amateur photos and hardly anyone would care about copyrights on them. Not all the images were fit for re-use, of course, but given their numbers, it didn’t matter much. And it was there that I for the first time really saw a digital watermark. It looked like this:

I should probably take a step back here to explain the highlighted “really saw”. Watermarks over digital images are, of course, ubiquitous — used by news agencies and media outlets, stock photography providers, commercial photographers and illustrators, entertainment portals, porn sites, even sometimes by regular social media users. But when it comes to the visual perception of these watermarked images there exists an unspoken convention bordering with habit — our mind ignores the watermark and tends to process the image as if there was no watermark at all. The watermark becomes transparent to our perception, at least as long as it exists in its proper context: a news agency logo on a photo has a much greater chance to be paid attention to if it appears on another agency’s web page and Stutterstock’s or Fotolia’s logo would rather catch our eyes when seen within someone’s advertisement or presentation. As for all the other normative cases, we have successfully trained our minds to ignore watermarks as just another visual noise even when it covers the whole image.

But what happens when the watermark itself is intruding into the image so drastically that it becomes its integral part and effectively distorts the image’s initial narrative? In such circumstances, the convention I’ve mentioned earlier ceases to function at least for some the of viewers and they begin seeing all three images simultaneously: the photograph under the watermark, the watermark itself, and the joint image which in this case is more than a mere sum of its components. One more layer is added to the interpretation of the image’s visual component and all the values normally associated with the photographic image — personal, sociocultural, historical, aesthetical — enter into new complex relations with added fragments (and here I would like to refer further to Margaret Olin’s texts, for example).

Speaking specifically about online auctions of antique photographic prints (specialized sections of Polish Allegro and German eBay, Belgian Delcampe, etc.), we can state that this joint image — an image of an image, in fact, — functions formally as an illustration of trade goods with additional protection against unwanted usage. (And I should add here that, unlike the majority of watermark usage cases, these old photographs usually do not constitute the intellectual property of their sellers except for very rare cases of people selling their personal or family photo archives.) Only in these cases the trade good in question is also an image, a physical photographic print on paper, and this image by definition cannot be neutral. And when it is overlayed by another non-neutral image — a watermark — sometimes it is no longer possible to interpret them separately.

There are numerous different ways the sellers add watermarks to their photographs, I haven’t witnessed such variety in watermarks anywhere else. To start with, these watermarks can be split into ‘digital’ and ‘analogue’. Under ‘digital’ I file all the images with a watermark added digitally, using some image editing software — thus, using the traditional way of protecting images online. ‘Analogue’ watermarks are created during scanning or photographing the print by introducing another object which is placed between the print and scanner surface or camera lens. Inside these two categories exist numerous subtypes which variety is actually limited only by people’s creativity, common sense, and Photoshop skills (meaning there are practically no limits at all).

And when users only type their usernames on the photo or write them on a piece of paper and put it into scanner along with the print, this intrusion can be read similarly to the watermarks that we are already used to and that are automatically ignored during the reading of an image. However, some users go way further and let their “artistic skills” loose which means that after their intervention into the external layer of an image (a photograph of a sold item — a photographic print) it is no longer possible to separate it from the internal layer (the contents of this photographic print). And it is exactly then, for example, when the images of Wehrmacht soldiers blooming with giant pink flowers come into existence.

This particular user from German eBay sells not the original prints but reproductions of images from “a personal archive” (though numbers, quality, and topics of those images suggest that they rather come from an old newspaper photo bank or a state organisation archive). Her catalogue encompasses several hundreds of images mostly from the WWII times, but also from the WWI and pre-war German colonies in Africa and Asia. And every single one of those images has the same flower in it, sometimes single, sometimes multiplied, mostly in colour but there are also a few black-and-white versions of it. Flowers have been strategically placed over the original images to still allow to evaluate its quality and topic but to render impossible its re-usage or even cropping to obtain a meaningful fragment without watermarks. Additionally, flowers also cover all the swastikas in the pictures to comply with the German law prohibiting public display of Nazi symbols.

Another user from Polish Allegro mostly sells vintage postcards — and before taking a photo of them for the product listing she places the same toy on every picture. And if you start scrolling through her online shop you’d see this plastic pink shooting star travel over train stations and churches destroyed in the Great War, over German-occupied Warsaw, over still-Polish Vilnius and Lviv and still-German Poznań.

Yet another seller, from Delcampe service, had cut a page of stickers with holiday wishes into pieces and puts them into scanner along with his photographs picturing both formal group portraits and genre scenes (sappers at work, sea bathing, kayak races, guardian tower in a camp) featuring German soldiers from the both World Wars.

Obviously, photographs depicting traumatic events (the WWII events in the first place, as photographs from these times are the most numerous and also easily recognizable among all the old photos sold online) constitute the most vulnerable to such intrusions category. Photographs of soldiers, military vehicles, destroyed cities, graves, scenes of the Holocaust or the occupation are already highly emotionally charged as such, any addition of new unrelated graphic elements to them can easily create a dissonance.

Can I as a viewer effectively distantiate from the fact that within one image there exist huge pink flowers right next to the Jews being transported to camps or the hanged Soviet partisans? Is a sight of toy shooting star (or maybe the Star of Bethlehem) flying over destroyed cities appropriate? Is this Wehrmacht soldier in the photo really wishing me “all the best”? (Probably not.)

So, how do we categorize these joint images with watermarks? Can such images still provide archival historical information? And what should we do with the aesthetics of these new images? ’Cause amongst hundreds of similarly edited images there are bound to appear such ones where the watermark is actually improving the overall aesthetics of an image colouristic- or composition-wise — if you can overlook the actual contents of an image. And again — is it ethical to overlook its contents and appraise the aesthetics alone?

These questions remain open and, I guess, everybody can try answering them themselves. But there is also another group of questions which directly relates to the authors of these collages. What guides them when they are choosing this or that way of adding watermarks to their photographs? Do they consider the resulting aesthetics of the images they produce? And if yes — why? Do they see it as an additional way to attract attention to their shops? Or is it not just a way to mark their ownership over the photograph but also conscious destruction of an image rendering it impossible to ever re-use it in any context (and should we then employ psychoanalytical methods here to study this desire to destroy traumatic images)? And finally, how do they evaluate the results of their work?

Those pink flowers have made such a deep impression on me when I first saw them that even before appropriating them for my new art project I tried to contact their author and ask her why did she choose these flowers in the first place. She did not understand my question at first and tried to explain that this was “for copyright reasons” and when I finally managed to explain my interest — she just cut our correspondence altogether.

It is somewhat easier to speak about the authors’ motivation in case of a different group of watermarked images — where the watermark is intentionally used to enhance viewers’ experience. With this purpose in mind, the sellers either directly write over a digital image certain technical details of the print (e.g. its size, place or date of shooting, names of prominent people in the image, region of origin, etc.) or highlight with circles or arrows the most important — from their point of view — details of the image (which can also get quite absurd, like a circle drawn around a tank on an image where there is nothing else but this tank in the frame).

Again, this is where the convention not to see the watermark is obliterated — the person applying the watermark consciously rejects this convention and instead uses the watermark as a visual guideline to reading the image. These joint images unlike the ones with flowers do not usually cause ethical dissonance but can still cause a cognitive one — for example, when people start drawing randomly directed arrows that do not actually point at anything but our brain still recognizes them as signs and keeps trying to decipher their meaning.

It’s worth noting that the excessive use of these arrows can sometimes lead to a rather comic effect — after browsing through dozens of early 20th-century studio portraits of soldiers covered with arrows it becomes rather difficult to stop thinking of st. Sebastian, who was also a soldier once before becoming a Christian saint and a gay icon.

Aside from photographs documenting traumatic historic events, there is also another totally different genre where watermarks can easily shift the register of the original image. I am talking about vintage erotic photographs and postcards. In this case, watermarks apart from copyright protection often also serve to cover genitalia and/or female nipples — and I believe it’s not only about self-censoring the image but also about additional encouragement of the potential buyers. At least, eBay policy expressively allows the sales of erotic photographs in specifically designated categories; Delcampe (paragraph 5.1.2) and Allegro policies demand to ”completely cover” intimate areas but in practice many users ignore this demand without any visible consequences.

Erotic images are just the genre where even minor intervention into the original image can easily shift its register towards utterly comical and I’m pretty much convinced that many people do that intentionally — for no other reason than just because they can. At least, I can find no other logic behind the series of images with the black pen, for example. Though not every case can be classified as a display of one’s sense of humour — and some of them, I sheerly hope, are not, like the case of the already mentioned earlier author with “Herzlichen Gluckwünsch” stickers.

In any case, the whole spectrum of watermarks usage in old photographs’ sales and also the conflicts caused by this usage look like a very reach and promising field for further studies within the visual anthropology framework. And it’s very much worth browsing through these online auctions in the process if only to remind oneself that images, in fact, are complex and fragile constructs of visual and social conventions that sometimes can fall apart under the weight of cheerful vernacular creativity and desire for self-expression.