Karakuri Babble is a daily column by the editors of i360.com, usually on topics tangentially related to anime and cosplay.

In the past we have endorsed many things; in the future we shall support many others.

A couple of weeks ago, a friend mentioned that he admired the American Apparel catalog photos. (His actual phrasing was somewhat coarser, but that summary will suffice.)

I knew I'd seen something about that style recently, but I couldn't figure out where until today, when I managed to excavate an interview with YONEHARA Yasumasa from my browser's history. Click the link, it's worth a read.

Briefly, the guy became famous for his lo-fi sexually-charged style, which American Apparel used (and still uses) to great effect in its ads and catalogs. It's heady stuff, really -- the style itself is so exuberant that the model has always seemed, to me, almost unnecessary. Yonehara is somewhat irritated by this:

They ripped me off. They made those ads after looking at my photos. If you ask around, you'll realize this is true. . . There is something kind of painful about it. Dov very skillfully took my methodology and made it work within a commercial context.

I think he's telling the truth, there, but at the same time I think it's too much to say he was ripped off. There's a limit to how broad any copyrighted idea can be, and the bones of this style are well past that. Amateur porn, after all, is a well-established genre. He says that his compositions and color choices were used, and that might be crossing the line -- but then again it might not.

I think that a lot of these things are just ideas that float around in the collective unconsciousness, independently invented, and who happens to get credit for them is based in luck and tenacity. Look at the number of people with claims to have invented the radio. Or the telephone. (Myself, I joke that I invented microblogging.) This is the same thing.

Picasso: "Good artists copy; great artists steal."

Or, to take an example by Gene Wolfe on my own field, writing:

I have learned . . . how much of our speech, which we think freshly minted in our own mouths, consists of set locutions. The Ascian seemed to speak only in sentences he had learned by rote, though until he used each for the first time we had never heard them. Foila seemed to speak as women commonly do, and if I had been asked whether she employed such tags, I would have said that she did not -- but how often one might have predicted the ends of her sentences from their beginnings.

It's all quotation. Take it as flattery.

words from chris, 2009-04-23 23:48:32, los angeles