By Jim Colton
In the wake of the landmark $1.2 million award reached in the Daniel Morel vs. AFP/Getty Images lawsuit for willful infringement of Morel’s images from the 2010 Haitian earthquake, there has been much discussion concerning photographer’s copyright and how to pursue organizations and publications for damages for unauthorized usage.
Veteran photojournalist Yunghi Kim is a strong proponent of photographer’s rights and offers suggestions to problems that all photographers now face as they tread through the morass of digital landmines. She also is quite vocal regarding protecting the value of one’s work. Kim says, “without monetary support, in whatever form that takes, photojournalism as an industry is dead!”
Kim espouses the adage that the best defense is often a good offense -- recommending photojournalists take preemptive measures in the present to prevent damage in the future.
And in contrast to Ben Lowy (recently interviewed for Photo Journal), Kim has strong opinions about iPhoneography and its place in the professional photojournalistic market.
Kim has been a staff photographer for the Patriot Ledger in Quincy, Massachusetts, the Boston Globe, and affiliated with the photo agency Contact Press Images for 20 years. She’s covered major international stories from the famine in Somalia in 1992 (for which she was the runner up for the Pulitzer) to documenting the lives of South Korean women who were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese army during World War II.
She’s received numerous major photojournalism awards, including the Olivier Rebbot Award and John Faber Award from the Overseas Press Club and Magazine Photographer of the Year from POYi(one of only two women to receive that award). She continues to give back to the photojournalism community as a member of the NPPA board of directors and instructor for the Eddie Adams Workshop and Missouri Photo Workshop.
Read the interview here: https://nppa.org/page/yunghi-kim-core-values