Yesterday, we reported the case of US photographer Alex Brown who told BJP that an image he shot in 2007 hds been used by LittleWhitehead without his consent or his credit. Brown's Sad Vader image (see it here, with our original report) and LittleWhitehead's sculpture are almost identical down to the kid's red jumper and black dungarees. 'I guess I should be flattered that someone has created a life size replica of one of my photographs, but I am not happy that they are passing it off as an original concept and that they make no reference to my original photograph,' says Brown.

According to Brown, the sculptors claim that while they did use the image as inspiration, they were unable to find, online, the original copyright owner. However, Brown says that his image has been widely distributed online, each time with clear copyright information.

BJP contacted the sculptors, and after a couple of back-and-forth, they have agreed to talk. Here is what they had to say:

We believe it is important to understand Spam in regards to the context of the exhibition it was part of. All the work in the exhibition looked at very unprecious, irreverent forms of artistic production. e.g. we deep fat fried and battered a 200 year old bible; we defaced photographs of award winners from a retail magazine and blew them up to life-size corporate portraits; we posted an obituary in a national paper for the death of a cartoon character.

For Spam we wanted to use a ubiquitous web image as our starting point and turn it into an artwork. "Vader kid" is on many blogs and is used by some as myspace profile photos. Contrary to what Alex Brown has said, many of blogs the photograph appears on does not credit him with the photograph (some of the websites have even put their own watermark on the image). We didn't know the photograph had been taken by a professional. But for us the photograph was only the starting point for our work. We were never interested in finding out who had taken the original, that was irrelevant to the working process. The fact the image already had such a large web presence is what made the image important to us. As pointed out by many posts on the blogs, our composition is very different from his. The whole feel of the work is also very different. We believe the problem has occurred because most people are viewing Spam as a photograph (particularly the photograph taken at a similar angle to that of Alex Brown's) and not in its entirety as a sculptural installation.

We contacted Alex immediately after hearing of his concerns and asked if there was anyway we could deal with the situation amicably. We assured him it was never our intention to upset him, nor was it merely to copy what he had already done. However, instead of replying to us, he has selected certain parts of this email and posted blogs slandering us plagiarists. He has also contacted galleries we've worked with also slandering us plagiarists. We do not really believe this is an appropriate first step towards dealing with the situation amicably.