[Foundation-l] GOOD Magazine: The Most Important Occupy Wall Street Photographer You've Never Heard of

[David Gerard]

http://www.good.is/post/the-most-important-occupy-wall-street-photographer-you-ve-never-heard-of/

An interview with David Shankbone that's actually about the joys of
contributing good, useful, original free content to the general
commons. A very good advertisement for the concept.

"You may not know his name, but if you've been paying attention to the
Occupy Wall Street protests for the past several weeks, you've no
doubt come across David Shankbone's photographs. They've run in New
York magazine, Gawker, Business Insider, and The New York Observer,
and here on GOOD—not to mention on countless blogs from around the
world. With so many major outlets running his OWS documentation, one
would think Shankbone would have amassed a small fortune in the past
several weeks. And he probably would have, if he charged any money for
his photographs.

For years now, well before OWS was a glimmer in anyone's eye,
Shankbone, a native New Yorker, has been taking photos of famous
people and events and uploading them to his Flickr account and
Wikimedia Commons. From those sites, all of his pictures are in the
public domain by way of Creative Commons licensing, meaning anyone can
download them and use them for free for whatever purposes they'd like.
Shankbone believes it adds to the greater good to distribute his work
this way, and if any photographer represents the spirit of OWS, it's
him."


- d.