I love looking at the photos in academic books, but I never had any idea how much work it was for authors to include them. I vaguely assumed that authors plucked these photos out of some great historical repository and then copied and pasted them into their manuscript as if they were a grad student working on a seminar paper. Alas, it is not so easy. This post describes my search for photos and my attempt to secure the permission to reproduce them in my first book. Now, let me state at the outset that am not a lawyer and am not familiar with the intricacies of copyright law. Instead, this post merely describes my perception of the process and is a continuation of my series about my experience as a first-time book author.
COPYRIGHT AND PERMISSIONS
As I understand it, the basic challenge is that authors don’t own the copyright to the photos that they want to use and therefore must pay for the right to reproduce those photos. There are a few exceptions, such as if you took the picture yourself, if you bought the copyright (which might include paying a photographer to take a photo for you), or if the photo is in the public domain because its copyright has expired. Somewhat confusingly, copyright protection varies by country, and I spent many hours parsing the Cornell University Library’s explanation of copyright term and the public domain. As far as copyright is concerned, the potential photos for my book could be divided into two categories depending on where the photo was first registered or published in the US or Vietnam. For photos registered or published for the first time before 1977 in the US, the copyright last 95 years after the publication date. Just about every American photo that I was interested fell under this umbrella. But photos registered or published in Vietnam for the first time are only under copyright for 50 years, as Cornell Copyright Services explained to me over email.1 Therefore, for historians who work on the Vietnam War or an earlier period, Vietnamese photos are in the public domain while American ones are not. However, it is much harder to find high quality period photos from Vietnam than from the US. As a result, historians of modern Vietnam like myself usually have to pay copyright holders. Additionally, photos are costly for publishers, as images raise raise the cost of printing, and publishers typically include a clause in the book contract imposing an upper limit on the maximum of black and white photos. Color photos are all but unheard of in most academic monographs.
My initial step was to determine what sort of photos I wanted to include. My first book, Disunion: Anticommunist Nationalism and the Making of the Republic of Vietnam, was about the anticommunist political opposition in the Republic of Vietnam (RVN, or South Vietnam) under the rule of Ngô Đình Diệm. I knew that most English-language readers were unfamiliar with political figures of the period, and I asked the publisher for black and white portraits of nine figures, preferably taken during Diệm’s rule from 1954 to 1963. These portraits would serve to introduce important historical figures and humanize them in the eyes of the reader. My editor at the University of Hawaii Press readily agreed to my request. I also had to figure out how much money I needed for securing permissions. Colleagues suggested a budge of $2000 to $3000 for photos and maps combined, and I estimated that permissions for the hypothetical photos would be between $100 to $400 apiece. My institution kindly provided me with the funds. (I’ll discuss maps in my next post.)
Securing permissions was far more technical than I had ever imagined. My publisher explained that I needed either high quality digital photos or print photos of at least 5 inches in width and that had been scanned at 300 dpi or higher. Additionally, I was to seek permissions for non-exclusive rights for usage of the photo within the context of my book. The permission had to cover rights for the first and all later editions of the book, worldwide and in any language, as well as any electronic versions. Of course, that was just the technical legal description. Very few academic books ever go into second editions or get translated. When approaching copyright holders, I also had to indicate whether I wanted to use the photo as a cover or interior illustration.
SEARCHING FOR PHOTOS DURING A TIME OF COVID
Then came the most difficult step: finding photos with identifiable copyright holders. There are four main sources of historical photos from the early RVN: 1) Vietnamese historical publications, 2) archival collections operated by governments and universities, 3) private family collections, and 4) commercial collections owned by licensing corporations. The most accessible source are Vietnamese historical publications from the 1950s and 1960s. The two publications with the largest number of photos of historical figures are the Yearbook of the National Assembly (Niên giám Quốc Hội,1956) and A.M. Savani’s Visage et images du Sud-Viêtnam (1955). The yearbook contains portraits and biographical sketches of all deputies in the RVN’s first legislature,including some of the only known historical photos of these men and women. Savani’s volume is a concise overview of southern Vietnamese politics and culture written by a French military intelligence officer as a guide for French soldiers, and it includes black and white photos of leading Vietnamese generals, religious leaders, and political figures from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s. I found both volumes at Cornell University Library during my research and later paid their scanning service to scan the desired photos. Thus, I had to pay for the scanning service but not for permissions. Unfortunately, the photos in the yearbook were printed in a moiré pattern that makes them look sort of pixelated, and the publisher told me those pictures were unusable. I could not use any images from the yearbook but did include a photo of Phạm Công Tắc from Visage et images in my book. As proof that this image was in the public domain, I submitted to my publisher a copy of the email from Cornell Copyright Services explaining the 50-year limit on Vietnamese copyright.
Public and university-affiliated archives are the second major source of historical photos. Unluckily for me, I began searching for photos just as the pandemic of 2020 was forcing archives and libraries around the world to shut down. I was unable to travel to any archive and could do little more than peruse online collections. The best online collection of RVN-era photos is the Vietnam Center and Archive at Texas Tech University. Their collections consist entirely of materials donated by private individuals, and the the archive didn’t actually hold the copyright to most of the photos I saw online. I found a few that I wanted to use for my book, and the archive staff contacted the copyright holder, but he never responded. I was unable to secure the necessary permission.
Third, photos of deceased political figures can be found in the private, unpublished photo collections of their family members. I managed to make contact with the family members of two politicians, Phan Quang Đán and Trần Văn Văn. The sons of both men kindly sent me high quality scans of their fathers and allowed me to use the images free of charge. As required by the publisher, I signed a contract with the family members, using a model contract provided by my publisher. But the pandemic eventually shut off private collections as an avenue of historical photos too. At the time, the CDC recommended that people avoid congregating in enclosed spaces unless absolutely necessary. If I reached out to the family members of other political figures, I would have had to ask them to visit a print shop in order to scan their photos. I couldn’t in good conscience let anyone risk their health for the sake of my book, and so I gave up on private collections after the first two photos.
The last source are the commercial collections of licensing corporations (if that is what they are called). These corporations own vast collections of high-quality, digitized historical photos to which they hold the copyright. There are four collections with photos from the Ngô Đình Diệm era: Everett Collection, AP Images (part of Associated Press), Camera Press, and Getty Images (formerly Corbis). I devoted days, if not weeks, to perusing their online catalog and requesting quotes for specific photos. The cost ranged from $150 to over $700 depending on the collection, and the price jumped if I wanted to use the photo on the cover of the book instead of as an interior illustration. Corbis had the largest collection of desirable photos but exorbitant prices and restrictive conditions, and three photos from them would have eaten up my entire budget. The other three had fewer useful photos but were more affordable, which meant I embarked on a time-consuming search in hopes of saving money. In the end, I purchased permissions from all three. Unlike with the family members, it was the licensing corporation that produced the contract for me to sign, though with occasional modification to reflect the specific language that my publisher wanted. I paid over $1400 for four images: Ngô Đình Diệm ($300, cover illustration, Everett Collection), Ngô Đình Nhu ($325, AP Images), Nguyễn Tôn Hoàn ($460, Camera Press), Phan Huy Quát ($325, Camera Press). Between budget limitations and pandemic conditions, I was only able to secure permissions for seven of the nine anticipated photos. Indeed, such prices mean that legally-obtained photo illustrations are hard to come by unless a researcher’s home institution will subsidize the cost.
Now, every time I look at the photos in an academic book, I wonder about the story behind them, not the story that the images convey but the story of the author’s tortuous search to find photos and secure permissions.
TECHNICAL STUFF
Image credit: https://www.pexels.com/photo/old-photos-in-the-wooden-box-5842/
- Gregory Green, email correspondence with author, February 14, 2020. ↩︎