Pinching pictures ……ever acceptable?

It will have been sometime in the summer of 1979 when I wandered back to the Cutty Sark on Ballast Quay.

Ballast Quay, 1979

A decade earlier the pub had been one of our regular haunts.

Even now the memory of sitting on that low wall on warm evenings with the powerful smell of the River and listening as the boats banged together from the swell of a passing pleasure cruiser is still magic undimmed by the passage of nearly sixty years.

And as you do thie first  picture has featured over time in my stories about the pub, Greenwich and the changes to the area.

Ballast Quay, 2022

So, I shouldn’t be surprised that "the man, the power station and the pub" should turn up on a social media site.

What I am not so happy about is that it was posted with no acknowledgement to me who took it or a date.

And that at best diminishes its value as a piece of history and ignores its ownership.

Without a date there is no context, no understanding of the place in the story of Greenwich and it becomes just a picture with little significance.

As such it is useless to a casual observer or the historian.

But a date places it in its time and allows you to draw conclusions about what the place was like in 1979.

More so when standing at roughly the same point in 2022 as recorded by Google Maps.

The advent of AI has in certain circumstannces challenged perception that what you see is really what it is.

So a date and source helps validate the image and I think makes it a more useful window on the past.

Added to which just lifting or more realistically pinching it does nothing for the person who created it.

Ah I hear you mutter, "it’s just the internet, its there so its fair game", but it’s not because if you adopt that attitude, it could be a parked bike standing outside the sweet shop …. "it’s there so it is ok to take it away".

But that would be pinching.

And for many their pictures or their research is their livelihood, and reflects their skill and talent, which is not served by picking it up at random and plonking down in an inappropriate place.

Now I make no great claims about my photograph but it is mine, and courtesy alone demands that I am credited.

But at least Peter the Pincher didn’t choose to crop the image which might totally distort the story behind the photograph.

Before I cropped my picture, 1979

In this case I did that.  

And I did so because I wanted just "the man, the power station and the pub", and that was my choice, but because both images are out there it is possible for people to assess them both.

Fair is fair.

Location; Ballast Quay, 

Pictures;  the man, the power station and the pub, ; Ballast Quay, Greenwich 1979, from the collection of Andrew Simpson and Ballast Quat, 2022, courtesy of Google Maps