Photographers vs creative directors : the big chaos of liabilities behind Balenciaga campaign
A few weeks ago an internationally known fashion house finally decided to entrust the campaign for the new Christmas accessories to an internationally renowned Italian photographer: Gabriele Galimberti, known for his reports of great social impact published by National Geographic. Among the most famous, the Toys series in which children are portrayed together with their toys in their bedrooms, but also Ameriguns, the controversial and spectacular series featuring American families instead portrayed together with their (sometimes very numerous) weapons of all kinds.
The Balenciaga campaign clearly takes up the photographer's style, placing a boy or girl in the center of the image, surrounded by a series of objects from the Balenciaga brand. So far so good, although many objects more or less explicitly referred to bondage equipment and objects of a sexual nature.
The campaign went online and was published without particular embarrassment by Balenciaga on its social channels.
Days later (several days later) if the platform has ever communicated any type of violation, it is the users who make the accusations rain down that they are winking at a certain pornographic world (supported by the fact that in a shot relating to an accessory, not created by Galimberti but from another photographer, a fragment of an American paper appeared relating to an important lawsuit on child pornography - USA vs Williams ).
Answer: cancellation of the campaign, but not only. Direct accusations by Balenciaga against the creative team that allowed the shots and the setting, with possible legal repercussions.
To find out where the reason lies, we should read the contracts and understand how a widely published campaign can be subject to re-discussion by the client. However, it is interesting to note the statement published the next day by Galimberti himself on his profile.
Two things in particular: the first is that the stylistic code of the photographer has been imprinted in the style of the campaign but the photographer has not decided anything: models, set, mood, setting. was called to snap.
The second: what's the point of reporting the name of the author of the shot (and also attributing responsibility for it) if he didn't decide anything about the shot? Wasn't it better to attribute the authorship to the creative team that conceived the whole scene, than to attribute paternity and responsibility? And then: can a client company really marry a creative idea and withdraw from it only according to the satisfaction of the users, declaring that it has not known anything about it despite the publication?
In short, the apocryphal campaign will have reputational effects on all known components of the creation itself regardless of who decided to create and publish it.
These days there is a provocation on anonymous photography seen as the frontier of those images that have little to say about the author because they lack the decision-making imprint of the creator himself, but full of meaning if carefully selected and well prepared by the curator. Lee Shulman's work, The anonymous project, talks about this. Is it possible that this will determine in the future a compression of copyright or its extension, or even a real shift to subjects directly involved in the decision-making process even if today they cannot yet attribute the paternity of a shot? If the authorial world is not immune to anonymization, can the commercial one be?