agxphoto.info Second Edition: Take It or Make It? Sean Peele Photography and Infringement Allegations

by John O'Keefe-Odom

AgXphoto.info

UPDATE: This article, originally published about a month before this printing, was taken down after some of the controversy died down. We were all sick of hearing about Mr. Peele's unscrupulous decisions.

Unfortunately, many of the exact same images which were used by Mr. Peele with the first website have returned under a new name. The article goes back up and stays up. While I can't say that this type of behavior is typical of the photographers I've met, in this particular instance, I think our readers will find that a significant amount of the content presented below is independently verifiable and observably true.

Subsequent discoveries revealed that it is likely that some of the infringement instances discussed in detail below were but a small percentage of the overall occurrences. The scope and intensity of the unethical practices involved may be wider and greater than those covered here.

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Do you take pictures or make pictures? And if you didn't make them, is it right to take them and present them as though the work was your own?

Those are the questions surrounding the website of San Diego photographer Sean Peele. A recent Photo.net thread highlighted the possibility that Mr. Peele may have appropriated many images and misrepresented them to the public as being his own work.

We've been able to confirm at least four instances of misrepresentation on Mr. Peele's website. As many as 37 photographers' work may be affected.

The impact of this is that many of the world’s better wedding photographers, some of whom have scored among the top 100 in peer reviews and critiques on Photo.net, have had their work taken and published under someone else’s name.

The people featured in the photos may have had no idea that this was happening to their images. Many of the clients have contracts with their hired photographers, which in some way license or limit or specify how the wedding photos would be used in the future.

Customers for Mr. Peele’s business were recruited, in part, by these appropriated photographs, so that he could profit. It’s not entirely clear which, if any, of the photos were actually made by Mr. Peele. Some are observably not his work.

The advertisements on Mr. Peele's website appear to have been a blend of three kinds of photos: some of his own, stock photos related to weddings, and photos made by other photographers and used without their permission.

Peele advertised wedding and event photography on his website for prices beginning at $390. Several of the photographers whom he took photos from offer services at near ten times that amount.

One such photographer is Rachel Barker. We came across Barker's work when we identified someone in one of her photographs. That photograph appeared on Mr. Peele’s website.

The Soldier in Photo 19

The groom wore Army Blues and was kissing his bride as they held up their wedding rings. The rank on the uniform sleeve was Specialist. The groom was a lower enlisted Soldier in the US Army. His nametag was clearly visible.

Click a few tabs into Mr. Peele’s website, and one could see the photo. Enter > Engagements and Weddings. It was the 19th photo in the line.

By reading the groom’s uniform, we were able to track him down. He's James Dreussi. After the photo was made, he continued with his military service, progressed and completed his enlistment. He is now working as a professional actor and is represented by an agency in Ohio.

With a check against the IMDB and some other websites, we were able to confirm that he was probably the same then-SPC Dreussi that was in the photo.

We asked Dreussi about the use of his wedding photo on Sean Peele's website. Dreussi was able to confirm that he was pictured in the photo, and that he had no idea that Mr. Peele was using that picture in his advertisements.

Dreussi wrote that the photo had been made by Rachel.

Rachel Barker is a professional photographer and ordained minister in Charlotte, North Carolina. She has been working as a wedding photographer for years; her pictures are good. Her recent bookings are made through Millie Holloman.com. Pricing begins at $3200.

Website Down & Some Photos Still Up

By 2 a.m. on Thursday morning, the website for Sean Peele photography had shut down. Still, several other websites were up, and transmitting his web page advertisements.

On one of them, we could still see the stock photos identified by Photo.net moderator Bob Atkins as distributed from iStockphoto.com.

When photographers submit photos for sale through a stock photography agency, they often have little or no control over who buys the photo, or what they use it for.

Some of the photos on Sean Peele's website feature brides in dresses, smiling at the camera. Two of them are clearly from iStockphoto. The photographer who made those is apparently Katrina Brown.

On one website, http://www.partypop.com/Vendors/4340009.htm, we can see Peele's advertisement with the stock photos there.

In a succession of photos on web pages describing Sean Peele’s services, we can see a man who looks similar. In two of the photos on the Party Pop.com page, we see a younger man. He's happy and smiling. He has short dark hair. Reclining on the grass with him is a brunette.

Two photos after this one, we see a man carrying a brunette on his back as he runs down a beach. It looks very much like the same pair of people. The bangs of her hairstyle look very much like the bride on the page a few photos later. They're young and happy and smiling.

People Looking Out For Number One

On a later page, related to a MySpace page, we see an older man labeled as Sean Peele. This man has recorded some songs. One of the songs is on the MySpace Page. It’s about Valentine’s Day. Another song is about high school. On an album cover icon, on another page about this man’s music, we can see smiling man with dark hair and touch of a receding hairline under a cowboy hat. It’s labeled as the music of Sean Peele. The song is "God Save Our Future Children If You Can."

The lyrics we can hear on the iTunes preview say:

"God, look upon our virtues

And see what we become.

There's just so many people

Looking out for number one.

Please help us give more to each other

And seek righteousness again.

God, save our future children, if you can."

The voice singing that song sounds like the voice on the recorded message at the telephone number for Sean Peele Photography.

On the website that came down, www.seanpeelephotography.com, was a photo of a man sailing. This same photo turned up on his Photo.net bio page and a Classmates.com entry linked to Sean Peele’s Google profile. It appears to be a picture of Sean Peele. Hair's a little thinner. He appears a little more stout.

Finally, on a Facebook page for a man named Sean Peele, we see one more photo that looks similar to the others. A little older still, we see a man wearing a camera and some dark clothes. He's standing on some stone stairs. There's a manicured garden in the background. Green, green grass and some water are nearby.

Below the picture, on the Facebook page, is a text box. It read, "Everything you think you know about me is wrong."

Candidacy and Being Candid

One of the facts which has come up is that on cached Google profile, Mr. Peele mentioned that he was a graduate of US Navy Officer Candidate School.

Looking over the Navy's OCS website, we see instructors yelling at candidates. There are pamphlets of procedures to read before you get there.

"PT starts immediately upon arrival," the Navy's OCS website noted. This means that the person who volunteers for a military officer candidacy will face constant scrutiny, and much of that scrutiny involves stress.

In Navy OCS the training is similar to most military schools which are candidacies. In the military, a candidacy is a time in training when the candidate is expected to show that he's already capable. It's a different kind of scrutiny. While some technical training is provided, and the training is phased, the person undertaking the training is expected to show throughout that he's the kind of person who's worth commissioning when the training is over. This pattern of scrutiny is mentally and emotionally more challenging than some other forms of military schooling.

OCS graduates aren't perfect. Yet, they have a tendency to be familiar with their own imperfections by the time they complete those courses.

The scrutiny officer candidates experience is somehow inconsistent with the behavior we've seen on Sean Peele's website.

Has Mr. Peele been pressured by something into bending some ethical guidelines? On these websites, it looks like some of them may have been bent until they were broken.

The Navy OCS website also mentions that the very large and sophisticated swimming pool that they use, all 347,000 gallons of chlorinated water held by The Combat Pool, was dedicated on July 9, 2009, to Medal of Honor recipient LT Michael P. Murphy, a US Navy Seal Officer.

LT Murphy died on a SEAL operation in the Hindu Kush of Afghanistan. The certificate for the Medal of Honor begins with the citation of conspicuous gallantry before the enemy. It tells us the same story we see in other posthumous Medal of Honor citations. Engaged by a much larger force, once again one man took great risks, despite wounds, led troops, continued fighting, and worked to do the right the thing.

The word "gallantry" is reserved in the military for citations like these. Medal of Honor recipients are the equivalent of knights of the realm in the United States. They’re traditionally saluted by everyone, regardless of rank, when they wear the Medal of Honor.

Lone Survivor and Two Names

The cached Google profile for Sean Peele listed key biographical details and included, under the category of "Other Names" Christopher Sean Peele. A man signed a review on Amazon.com as Christoper S. Peele "Sean Peele" from San Diego.

The Amazon review commented on the book Lone Survivor, which is about the SEAL operation on which LT Murphy lost his life. The review concluded with the words, "Thank you Marcus Luttrell, I salute you."

Marcus Luttrell was the sole survivor of the SEAL mission. At the time, he was a Hospital Corpsman Second Class. He was an enlisted sailor. We know this from the Medal of Honor documents like the Summary of Action, published by the Navy, on their websites.

Just as Marcus Luttrell was enlisted in the Navy, so also SPC Dreussi was enlisted in the Army. Mr. Peele, when he served, became an officer. His review of Lone Survivor was posted to Amazon in November of 2007.

Two of the photos on Mr. Peele’s website that I reviewed, and interviewed a photographer about, were initially uploaded to the Internet on November 14, 2007.

Nadine O’Hara made those two photos. In the technical data that accompanies those uploads to portfolios on Photo.net, the date of upload is recorded and displayed.

In an adjacent Amazon review, two years later, Peele wrote about some difficulties he had with upgrading his copy of Photoshop CS2 to CS4. This computer program is the premier image editing program; it's widely used by professional photographers to edit digital images. This upgrade apparently took place in September 2009.

In that review, we see accounts of everyday frustrations. Peele kept on hold for an hour. The paragraphs recite the trials and tribulations of upgrading Photoshop and trying to get some customer service from a large corporation. He had to cycle through those menus of automatic help and scripted service several times. It's the same set of headaches that anyone who's been on hold for a really long time might imagine.

That review was published in 2009.

Landslides Into the Ocean

The Google profile for Sean Peele listed several companies he had worked for: Pfizer, Bristol Myers-Squibb, Novartis. All three are pharmaceutical companies. He doesn’t mention in what capacity or when he worked with them. In the past few years, news stories about those corporations have included topics like layoffs, restructuring and lawsuits.

No large company could escape marketplace tribulations by 2009. By then things had gotten tougher all over.

One of the bright spots of 2009 was the success of students at Palos Verdes Peninsula High School. Before it was renamed in 1991, it was Rolling Hills High School. Sean Peale went there; he graduated in 1976, according to the biography which had been up on Classmates.com.

This biography was linked to from the Google profile page for Sean Peele. That bio carried the same picture as the biography on www.seanpeelephotography.com.

Palos Verdes High School tells us a little bit about the kind of community that's grown up from Rolling Hills High School. 23 National Merit scholars graduated from there in 2009. It's ranked 89 out of 18,500 schools evaluated by US News and World Report. The school's list of accolades reads like the home room roll of really good school stuff.

They have the country's largest high school publication: their yearbook. There's probably some photography in there.

The community of Ranchos Palos Verdes also seems to have terrain that's prone to landslides into the ocean. Ranchos Palos Verdes is on the southwestern corner of Los Angeles County, which encompasses a big section of Sean Peele's described sales and service territory.

There’s been a landslide of public outcry against this specific instance of photographic piracy.

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Bibliographic References:

List of photographers whose work may have been affected:

Chris Harrison

Edward Horn

Dave Gardner

Edwin Mendoza

Jerry King

Tracy Fairey

Thomas Paul

Michael Brown