WARNING: Viv and Larry would NOT Approve

Dear vivandlarry.com gallery users,

I wasn’t sure where else to put this as it may get lengthy, so I’m doing it here and hopefully people will read it because I think it’s very important.

I was perusing the Vivien Leigh contents of ebay.com today and found something that made me pretty angry. There are currently two listing up for auction–two hand colored photos–that can be found in the gallery at vivandlarry.com. One of them was specifically hand colored for this site by a personal friend of mine. I know this for a fact. She did not find it anywhere else online…not worth1,000, not someone else’s website, she spent time and effort hand coloring a photo another user graciously scanned and donated from her personal collection specifically for this site.

To see this photo up for auction on ebay, to be sold for profit by someone who got permission neither from myself nor the person who’s work went in to coloring that photo for other people’s enjoyment (or the person who’s collection it originally came from for that matter), really pisses me off. Now, I don’t know if this seller personally registered for the gallery here, saw it, and thought it would be nice to print out and sell, or if someone else found it here and passed it along. Either way, it’s pretty shady if you ask me and I don’t appreciate and neither does my friend. Visitors to vivandlarry.com’s gallery can print any of the photos for their personal collection for free and get better quality than they would buying a repro. of a photo that is originally smaller than 8×10 on ebay. Smaller photos blown up=shit quality.

It’s one thing to put a photo on another website (something that pisses most web people off anyway), but it’s entirely something else to try and make a profit off someone else’s creativity. I think the fact that the photo was hand colored by a visitor to the site sets it apart from other photos someone might buy or reproduce from archival negatives, original prints, or anything like that. I see a lot of reproduced photos on ebay that can also be found in the gallery here and that can be purchased or downloaded anywhere on the internet, but not photos like this, which I consider to be “original”, sort of on the same level as graphic design or print work, which is why I’m angry. You just don’t do that.

Long story short: I really don’t want to take down the gallery or take out special contributions to the site. Th e goal of the site in general and the gallery specifically is to have the most rare/HQ photos; I don’t want to have the same photos every other site has. However, I don’t want to see other people’s creativity for sale without permission. Therefore, if this happens again, I might have no other choice but to take down the gallery completely (and what’s the website without the gallery?). It’s up to you.

I would also ask you not to bid on or purchase that particular photo on ebay. If you want a glossy of it for your wall or something, just print it out from the website for free and save not only image quality but money as well.

Happy holidays.