The photo essay assignment concerned me at first, as I wasn’t sure what topic I should choose. I was worried that I would struggle to find sufficient pictures for any given topic. However, once I decided to focus on the five organizers of the First Women’s Convention in Seneca Falls, it turned out to be easier than I expected.
I initially began my search in the Library of Congress prints and photographs archive, but wasn’t able to find much except for a few pictures of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. I next went to the National Parks Service website as I knew that the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls is a national park. This website turned out to be my greatest resource as it had information on the event, the five women and a few pictures of some of the women. For the lesser known of the five women, I had to go a bit further to find photographs. I started by doing a google image search and was able to find good pictures right away. I was able to use photos from the Cayuga Museum, and a professor’s webpage at Pierce College. I also used Wikipedia for a few of the pictures. I was pleasantly surprised at the ease with which I was able to quickly locate photos of all of the women. I had never heard of Martha Wright, Mary Ann M’Clintock or Jane Hunt so I initially thought that it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to find photos of them, particularly after I had had no luck with the Library of Congress.
My biggest concern with the assignment was the issue of copyright. While the National Parks Service seems to be clear that all information on the site is considered in the public domain, it was less clear on the other sites. On both the Cayuga website and the Pierce College website, I could not find any information on copyright. I used them under the assumption that because they were government and education websites that what was posted was most likely in the public domain and acceptable to use for educational purposes. The issue of copyright, however, is daunting for me as I struggle to even understand the copyright or “public domain” explanations on the websites. The legal terminology is lost on me and I feel as though it would be easy for me to misread or misinterpret the availability of the photos.
While it is amazing how much information and how many photos are available on the web, the issue of copyright is one that becomes very hard to navigate. It has become so easy to copy and reuse photos that it seems that the use of copyrighted photographs becomes so easy that one can easily forget that what they are using is, in fact, “illegal.” This assignment has opened me up to the issue of using photos from the Internet and the issues, both legal and ethical, which arise from that use.
