User talk:Eightheads

Welcome!

Hello, Eightheads, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

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I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on discussion pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place {{helpme}} before the question. Again, welcome! Mike Christie (talk) 02:20, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

Sources and Conflict of Interest

Hello! just a note that sources are very important on Wikipedia. Please do not add material that lacks sources, and please do not remove material that has sources! Your edits to Nancy Lee Katz put it at risk of deletion as you removed two sources, leaving only one.

Finally, you need to declare your conflict of interest on this page, and use the talk page to request edits. If you are being paid in your executor position, you need to declare that as well. Executors have no special rights on Wikipedia, please see WP:OWN. In general there is very, very, little interest in having official representatives of the people who we write about control those pages. This is because the most neutral party is always going to be the impartial person with no personal knowledge who is writing based on published sources, rather than a representative who is writing based with reference to their personal experiences and knowledge. I hope that makes sense. --- Possibly ☎ 02:37, 11 August 2021 (UTC)

Please use the talk page (here or the article talk page) to communicate, rather than edit summaries. Thanks. --- Possibly ☎ 03:01, 11 August 2021 (UTC)

I have read the below for which I thank you. If I understand it correctly, I may not edit the NANCY LEE KATZ entry. Rather, I may propose edits on this page such that someone without a conflict of interest may insert them. Is that correct? The basic problem is that her work has been known only for the past three years and aside from the Museum of Fine Arts Houston website, nothing has been published about her or her work. By way of disclosure, as the Executor of her estate I have no financial renumeration. I am the owner of the copyrights to her work and I am the source of photographs that go into museums, and I have no financial interest in any of that. Is that sufficient disclosure? If not, what else would be appropriate to disclose?

For instance, it seems to me that a reasonably addition to the page would be to list additional museums that have collected her photographs, as follows: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Collection of the Supreme Court, Israel Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, National Gallery of Canada, New Orleans Museum of Art.

What comes next? Do I ask you, Possibly, to enter that additional information?

Also, it seems to me that it would be useful to include some of her images. How do we accomplish that? Eightheads (talk) 03:19, 11 August 2021 (UTC)

@Eightheads: Thanks for the above, and for being willing to work within our policies and guidelines. I moved your answer down here so that it's in order. Your COI declaration has been added to the article talk page, so you are OK there. Thank you for explaining that there is no payment involved.

Regarding more Museums, the best place to request that is on the talk page.. but since we are here, I looked at LACMA, and she did not come up in the collection search. Same story for National Gallery of Canada and the New Orleans Museum of Art. Checking others. We avoid using primary sources such as the list that you have. What we need are independent mentions in the press.

For images, which would be very welcomed, you can go to Wikimedia commons and use the same account to upload images. You will have to license them so that anyone can use them for free though; you might consider uploading low-res or medium resolution images. Something like 1000 pixels wide goes a long way. You can expect the same welcome over at Commons (sorry), where they will challenge you to prove ownership of the images. That has to go through something called OTRS. Hope this helps, and thanks for playing by the rules. you can ping me by typing @Possibly: and I will see your message. --- Possibly ☎ 04:12, 11 August 2021 (UTC)

PS: if there are articles in magazines or newspapers about her, online or not, please let us know. It would be good to include more biographical detail, but I cannot find much online. --- Possibly ☎ 04:18, 11 August 2021 (UTC)

Managing a conflict of interest

Hello, Eightheads. We welcome your contributions, but if you have an external relationship with the people, places or things you have written about on the page Nancy Lee Katz, you may have a conflict of interest (COI). Editors with a conflict of interest may be unduly influenced by their connection to the topic. See the conflict of interest guideline and FAQ for organizations for more information. We ask that you:

• avoid editing or creating articles about yourself, your family, friends, colleagues, company, organization or competitors;
• propose changes on the talk pages of affected articles (you can use the {{request edit}} template);
• disclose your conflict of interest when discussing affected articles (see Wikipedia:Conflict of interest#How to disclose a COI);
• avoid linking to your organization's website in other articles (see Wikipedia:Spam);
• do your best to comply with Wikipedia's content policies.

In addition, you are required by the Wikimedia Foundation's terms of use to disclose your employer, client, and affiliation with respect to any contribution which forms all or part of work for which you receive, or expect to receive, compensation. See Wikipedia:Paid-contribution disclosure.

Also, editing for the purpose of advertising, publicising, or promoting anyone or anything is not permitted. Thank you. --- Possibly ☎ 02:38, 11 August 2021 (UTC)

@Possibly: Many thanks for your work on this entry and for your constructive comments. I apologize for my faux-pas in improperly editing your entry. As you may have gathered, I am a novice at this, not having known, for instance, about the existence of Talk pages.

As regards COI, to be precise, as Executor of her estate, which is now essentially closed, and owner of the copyrights and of her art works, I have no financial interest in any of this. She never offered her prints for sale, and I am following her lead in not offering them for sale, or for that matter on any basis to collectors, just gratis to major museums. Similarly, when I license them for publication, there is no financial consideration involved, just one or two copies of the publication.

Her work was totally unknown prior to her death three years ago. She kept it private, showed it to no one with one exception, did not exhibit it, and did not publish it, although a few of the subjects published her photographs of them. I find it amazing that work of a totally unknown artist is being accepted in the museum world; apparently her work speaks for itself. There are no published articles on her so far simply because her work is new to the world. As regards your inability to find references to her with certain museums, aside from the fact that not every museum illustrates or even lists every art work that it holds, the entries into museum collections such as LACMA and National Gallery of Art have been very recent.

As regards establishing a gallery of her images, I am not at the moment inclined to give up even limited copyright to Commons. I wonder if a partial solution might be to have the phrase "forty-six of her photographs" linked directly to the first reference, so that the reader would be prompted, if he or she wishes, to call up those 46 images.

Eightheads (talk) 23:53, 12 August 2021 (UTC)

@Eightheads: thanks for the above. We do not link directly to outside site in the body of the article, so "forty-six of her photographs" linked directly to the first reference is not an option. For the rest, material can be added to the article but it has to be well sourced. Other people have to have written about it. That applies to the fact that she was secretive about her work and so on. She was a fantastic photographer, so I imagine that there will be more independent sources written in the coming decade. --- Possibly ☎ 05:16, 14 August 2021 (UTC)

@Possibly: Thank you for adding a reference to my edit, which had not occurred to me. I am just gradually catching on to the system. And I very much appreciate your kind words about Nancy's work. I was initially astonished that major museums would take the work of a totally-unknown artist, but now I am up to 14 museums, some of them pending. When additional museum references appear, I can add them to the entry, to spare you the time and energy. Also, I am considering going the limited copyright release route and creating a gallery of the 133 images in her "pantheon", or would that be too many? More generally, I am astounded at the magnitude of your project of creating entries for female artists, which certainly is a major and important contribution. It just occurred to me to wonder whether you might have use for any of Nancy's images of female artists and photographers, namely: Abakanowicz, Bassman, Bing, Bourgeois, Catlett, Celmins, Frankenthaler, Lin, Marisol, Messager, Rockburne, Spero, Winsor, and Zeisel.— Preceding unsigned comment added by Eightheads (talk • contribs)

@Eightheads: Yes she was indeed an important photographer; that is why the museums are taking the work. Museums are very, very picky. That 14 took work means something. We are getting a bit off-track, but If I were you I would in touch with some academics who are photo-historians, so that they can write about her. There have been cases like this before (see Vivian Maier). I can only imagine that photographic art dealers would assign significant value to the works. Someone like the International Center of Photography and the Center for Creative Photography may be able to help. If you release images for Wikipedia use (via Wikimedia Commons), I don't believe there is much in the way of a "limited release"" it is all or nothing.

So, yes, of course we would love to have those images on Wikipedia/Wikimedia. However if I were you I would get some professional advice on the value, which might be not insignificant. I hope that helps. --- Possibly ☎ 16:26, 14 August 2021 (UTC)

@Possibly: Again, I appreciate your various comments. I have been leery of using this space for matters not directly related to Wikipedia issues, and appreciate your willingness to go off-track. Nancy chose not to sell prints. I am honoring her wishes and staying away from any commercial use of her work, notwithstanding requests from certain dealers and collectors to sell prints, which certainly would have significant value in the marketplace. I do, however, appreciate your concern regarding this issue. I am also aware of the Vivian Maier situation, having seen the film and reproductions of the images and know about certain dealer practises in her market. As regards academics writing about Nancy, yes, I am sure that that will happen.

My main aim now, before I kick off, is to get the work into museums so that it will not be lost forever, trusting that the images will thereby come into their own over the decades. Back to Wikipedia: The good news is that a short biography has been published on Luminous-Lint, which is a major resource for the history of photography. The bad news is that I wrote the text, so that might disqualify it for quotation on Wikipedia. Perhaps you could advise me as to what can be quoted or referred to, if anything. http://www.luminous-lint.com/z01/photographer/Nancy_Lee__Katz/A/

Thanks for the note. A biography that you wrote would not be considered a reliable source, as you are too close to the subject. What is needed are independent authors who come to the subject without any personal connection. That will no doubt happen over time! Regarding the collections, congrats. That is a very significant accomplishment. --- Possibly ☎ 21:08, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

Picture of Nancy Lee Katz

Hello! It occurred to me that you probably have many, many of pictures of Nancy Lee Katz. It would be good to have a portrait of her for the Wikipedia page. If you upload one to Wikimedia Commons, let me know and I will make sure it gets inserted in the article properly. Thanks. --- Possibly ☎ 01:10, 25 August 2021 (UTC)

@Possibly: I very much appreciate this suggestion and have been struggling to find pictures of Nancy because, in her typical self-effacing way, she generally did not permit anyone not only to see the marvelous photographs that she created, but also to take pictures of her. I have found just two that reveal aspects of her and I am writing to ask if either might be appropriate for the Wikipedia article. One is in color, a snapshot taken of her with her flowered bicycle taken in front of the Museum of Modern Art; the bicycle had hundreds of artificial flowers woven into the structure of the basket and was a New York sight; people would stop her to take pictures of it. The other is a black and white photograph that I took of her on a trip to an orangutan sanctuary in Borneo, in which she, with a camera, is next to and just touching an orangutan mother and baby. The first image shows her in various of her elements: with that extraordinary means of locomotion which she used all the time in New York and at the museum she frequented; the second with photographic subjects, albeit ones that were idiosyncratic even for her. Would either work in the upper right boxed entry and/or elsewhere in the page? Thanks again. P.S. I am now up to 16 museums with her work, the latest being National Gallery of Art, Harvard Art Museums, and George Eastman Museum.