James Danziger, owner of New York's Danziger Gallery, has answered criticism over an AI-generated colour rendition of Ansel Adams' 1941 photograph Moonrise, which the gallery offered for sale at The Photography Show (AIPAD) in New York. In a statement he argued that he was free to make a new, transformative work because the original picture is in the public domain.
The objection came from the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust, which said over the weekend that it had never authorised, endorsed or agreed to the colour version. The trust presented the dispute as a question of artists' and moral rights rather than of the software used, saying no one should profit from another person's name and labour without consent and candour.
Danziger says one of the country's leading copyright lawyers confirmed the public-domain status before he went ahead. He describes the piece as an act of admiration: AI produced the starting image, he says, but people then spent months editing and refining it to imagine what Adams saw when he pulled over on U.S. Highway 84 at sunset and hurried to set up his large-format camera, and he would only show or sell it once he judged it perfect. Reworking public-domain art is an old tradition, he argued, before quoting Adams himself, who predicted in 1983 that electronic imaging held astonishing developments.
PetaPixel notes that Moonrise was first published in the early 1940s and that no renewal of its copyright, which would have been due around 1968 to 1970, appears in Stanford's renewals database. It adds that the colour image, being AI-generated, cannot itself be protected by copyright.
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