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Music videos quote famous photographs

One of the dirty little secrets of the music biz is that directors sometimes base their music videos on pre-existing photographs. I say "dirty" because some of the borrowing has all the subtlety of an MC Hammer hit. This (excellent) 1996 article from Film Comment refers to the practice as plagiarism, and I certainly wouldn't go that far, but it's hard not to empathize with some of the copyright rights holders mentioned here. Robert Frank, for example. Don Henley took some photographs from Frank's classic book The Americans, recreated them, and made them appear to come to life in his video for "The End of Innocence." Where Frank's book was a somber meditation on class and the mythical American Dream, Henley's video was an unabashed celebration of that myth. A generation raised on MTV wouldn't know the difference, or even catch the reference. If I were Frank, I'd be livid -- and he was. Henley ended up having to pull the video from MTV. Still, this doesn't make laws forbiding artists from transforming copyrighted works a good idea; a law that prevents odious or hackneyed borrowings will prevent critical or beautiful ones as well.

(Thanks, Blue Montakhab)