Several years ago I did social media for an art gallery. Lo-diza's work was featured in the gallery and I promoted her work because her photos, and the subversive ideas behind them, are strange and exotic and provocative and weird. I love her artistic vision and dedication to her craft. At this point in time she was getting ready to open an exhibit at a gallery down the road a few towns away. She titled the exhibit Circus on Broken Boulevard and described it like this: "My aim is to deconstruct the American 'fog' & other fairy tales by offering a critical view of the actual state of things … to reveal the true nature of human life stripped of pretenses that hide authentic feelings of loneliness, isolation & insecurity." Her work is phenomenal. She's an old-school shutterbug. I promoted and helped sell dozens of her photographs.
I offered to write a feature press release to celebrate her exhibit down the road. She agreed. I asked her to come in so I could take a photograph of her. She agreed again. Plain and simple, I asked her to sit for me and she said Yes. Her husband was standing a few feet away. There was no arm-twisting. No begging. Nothing other than a simple and heartfelt request so that I could promote her work. She hemmed and hawed a bit because she has low self-esteem but she willingly sat for me. Had she said no, that would have been the end of it. But I asked, and she said yes.
I wrote and posted the story on the local art gallery's social media page along with the photo I took of Lo-diza, which is the one at the top of this post. A few days later she called and asked me to remove the photo. I declined and she pushed the issue. She asked me to put a cutout of a horse's head over her own head. I declined again. We went back and forth for a week before the owner of this gallery asked me to take the photo down. I was not happy about it but did so to honor my friendship with the owner.
This doesn't mean I wasn't going to not post the photo of Lo-diza elsewhere online. I'm a photographer just like her, an artist just like her. I am the owner of, and claim all rights to, this rare public photo of photographer Lo-diza Le-Pore. I posted the photo on my personal social media pages. Lo diza saw the photo and went nuts because she's unwell or because her brain is soggy and mushy from playing with darkroom chemicals for too long, or both (which is my best guess). She created perverted Photoshopped images with slanderous claims of me having harassment issues. This is patently false and a lie. She posted them on several websites including her own. I contacted most of the websites to have the images removed. The headshot she used belongs to a newspaper. In other words, she stole someone else's intellectual property to slander me.
Here's someone who rails against all the bad things in life, including censorship, yet she tried to censor my art in a disgusting and delusional way. I did not force or coerce Lo-diza Le-Pore to sit for our photo session. I asked her nicely and she agreed. With her permission and willingness, I took a photograph of a great photographer and shared it online. I make no apologies.
Now, I'll make her a deal: she can buy the photo (and all rights to it) for $5,000 and I'll delete it from wherever I posted it. But she must first delete every demented post about me, including all metadata.
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