Jason Tag Photography

This morning I woke up and had an interesting thought. Does anybody work these days as Muse? I began thinking about this as I drove to work. What occurred to me is that it might be interesting to work with someone on this level because it would be a collaborative artistic relationship. Which I find to be the most exciting of all artistic relationships. One where the Muse and Photographer create ideas and share a common vision. The purpose of which would be to create art that satisfies both Photographer and Muse. I find this idea fascinating because it would allow the Model/Muse to be more creative than in any other Model/Photographer relationship. She would have the ability to select poses, locations, wardrobe items, accessories, the whole nine yards. Just as much as the photographer would.

Of course this raises some interesting questions. Who would own the copyrights if the images contain ideas of both Photographer and Muse? Can the images be published? Under what circumstances can they be published? Who benefits from the publication?

As I wrestled with the issues of this type of artistic endeavour. I came up with a few ideas. This would be a relationship where the model isn’t being paid to pose for a photographer because the Muse is working as an artist as well. This is not to say that the Muse wold not be able to make money from her work. In this kind of collaboration, the Muse should have the rights to publish any photos from this endeavour commercially. And maybe the Photographer should be allowed to publish the work but only in a limited capacity. For example, the Muse could sell the work as prints and the Photographer could only publish through the web at a slightly lower resolution.

The problem that arises is that both Modeling and Photography are inherently expensive. A models time is valuable and if they’re buying wardrobe or accessories for shoots it can get very expensive. Photographers of course have the cost and maintenace of the equipment to worry about as well as their time. So both persons would have a need to publish the work commercially to recover any costs incurred in the process and to make a profit in order to continue working in this manner. Who has what rights and how the work should be published is up to the Muse and Photographer to agree upon.

I am definetly interested in this idea and I’ll have to spend more time thinking about it.