26/05/25 – When a Photo Credit Becomes an “Unnecessary Detail”

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Here’s this week’s letter and question:

This week, I managed to get myself into a minor tussle with an online music publication over photo credits.

Several of my images were included in a rather lovely review for a musician I’d worked with. She had sent the journalist the photos and asked for my name to be included, but it somehow didn’t make it in.

This isn’t exactly a rare occurrence, especially here in Spain, where some publications still seem to operate on a slightly outdated “everything is public domain” approach to photographs. So I sent a polite message asking if they could update the article with the correct credit.

After a few days of no response, I mentioned it light-heartedly in my Instagram stories. Shortly after, and to my horror, I noticed the publication had actually reposted my story on their own page, which I can only assume meant the message had finally made its way to the right person, albeit in a slightly unintended way. At that point, things had clearly escalated beyond what I intended, and I then received a fairly sharp message back from the journalist.

At DIYP, we sometimes get asked to make small corrections, and in most cases, it takes about two seconds to update a credit in the backend, it’s really no big deal. So I wasn’t really prepared for a relatively straightforward request for attribution to be met with the response it got.

The gist of it was that photo credits were described as “an unnecessary and inconsequential detail,” followed by a suggestion that I was overreacting and should “take a deep breath and count to ten.”

Which was not quite the direction I expected things to go in, and left me wondering: AITA here?

I didn’t really think I was, and I also didn’t particularly appreciate the tone of the response. It felt unnecessarily dismissive, especially given that it cost nothing to include a credit in the first place.

So I took a breath (I counted to ten lol), and sent a friendly reply explaining why attribution actually matters quite a lot in photography.

Music photographers in particular (but also sports photographers and many others working in editorial spaces) are often not particularly well paid for individual jobs. What we do get in return, at least in part, is visibility: credits, bylines, and the ability to point to published work as proof of what we do.

“Exposure” is already a slightly awkward currency at the best of times, but it becomes almost meaningless if your name isn’t attached to the work at all.

At no point did I go into the legal side of things, or the fact that in Europe, this is actually a copyright issue, and I could have pushed it further if I had wanted to. That didn’t feel necessary, especially as the images were tied to a musician I had worked with and I had no interest in creating a problem for them.

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What I did mention instead was that in an era of generative AI and increasingly fluid authorship online, attribution feels more important than ever, not less. I’ve already had images of mine mistaken for AI-generated work this year, which makes the presence of a real photographer’s name alongside an image feel like a surprisingly important anchor.

Interestingly, this isn’t so different from how musicians feel when their work is used without permission or credit in other contexts. If anything, it’s the same principle expressed in a different medium. As artists, we should be supporting each other more than ever, not less.

In the end, it was all resolved fairly quickly and without too much more drama. The credit was added, the article was updated, and life moved on. However, it did make me think about how easy it is for photography to become detached from the people who make it. Images travel quickly, get reposted, embedded, reshared, and recontextualised without much thought about where they came from in the first place.

Most of the time, that’s not done with any bad intent, but it does mean that attribution can start to feel like an optional extra rather than part of the work itself. That’s why these small moments matter more than they seem to at first glance, not because of ego, but because a photograph is never just an object that appears. It’s the result of hundreds of decisions, effort, timing, experience, and intention, made by a real human. And yes, it’s nice to have that acknowledged.

Have you ever had to fight for photo credit? How did it go?

Have a great week!
Alex and the DIYP Team