Abstract by Richard Misek
This talk complements the screening of ‘A History Of The World According To Getty Images’ by exploring the stories behind some of the clips that I included in the film, and investigating the corporate logic of commercial ‘image banks’. How did Getty become the largest image bank in the world? What is its current business model? How do intellectual property and moral rights fit into the equation? And how does the wider commercialisation of the archive sector affect how filmmakers can use and reuse images? In this talk, I shall provide some tentative answers to these and other questions.