Susan Meiselas, born 1948, is an American documentary photographer from Baltimore, Maryland. She earned her Bachelor's at Sarah Lawrence and a Masters in visual education from Harvard. After completing her education at Harvard, she worked for the New York
 public school system from 1972-1974 designing a curriculum in photography for 4th-6th graders. During this time, she completed her first major work, CARNIVAL STRIPPERS, which documented the experiences of women who performed strip-tease at carnivals in New England, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina \cite{meiselas}\cite{foundation}. She sought to capture both, “the dancers' public performances as well as their private lives.”  
Like most of her work, CARNIVAL STRIPPERS, attempts gain a deep understanding 
of the subject, both as they are seen by the world, and perhaps how they see themselves. In her words, “I wanted to present an account of the girl show that portrayed what I saw and revealed how the people involved felt about what they were doing...You are in a kind
of collaboration with your subject, and they have to want you to be there and want you to know them, and you have to want to also, and that’s a very deep thing ... so I think I am a listener, and I like sharing what I discover" \cite{meiselas2008}. Meiselas tries to allow her images to show both the situation her subjects are in, and the relevance that situation has to the them as people  
After the success of CARNIVAL STRIPPERS, she was invited by to become a “nominee member” (basically a two-year test period with no binding commitment on either side) of Magnum Photos. According to their website, “Magnum Photos is a photographic cooperative
of great diversity and distinction owned by its photographer members.”
In 1978, she left for Nicaragua to embark on her second major work, NICARAGUA, JUNE 1978-JULY 1979 \cite{meiselas}\cite{foundation}. For this piece, she documented the struggle between the Sandinista rebels and the Somoza Regime. It was on this (her first of three trips to Nicaragua -- 1979, 1989, 2004) that she captured the iconic image, Sandinistas at the walls of the Esteli National Guard headquarters, 1979, which later became known simply as Molotov Man. This image depicts Pablo Arauz, a Sandinista, on the final day of the revolution, July 16, 1979, about to hurl a molotov cocktail during a battle at the walls of the Esteli National Guard headquarters.
Joy Garnett, born 1965, is a New York City based painter. She completed her undergraduate studies at McGill University in 1983,
and then moved to Paris in
1984 to study at École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. She returned to New York in 1988 and received a Masters in Fine Arts from City College in 1991. After graduation, she was featured in a number of group shows, and had her first solo show, “Buster-Jangle,” in which she painted depictions of photographs of atomic bomb tests that she found online. In many ways, this show is emblematic of her other work in that it seeks to tie together both new and traditional media, and to explore the relationship between visual art and perception/emotion.
 
“Some of these images are official government records; others are snapshots by soldiers who were fatefully exposed to the experiments at close range. Garnett's interest has its deepest roots in the latter: Many of the G.I.'s said that the towering atomic mushrooms were the most beautiful things they'd ever seen”\cite{griffin1999}.  “It's in this paradoxical realm of terrible beauty that the canvases are most engaging, tying together the histories of the bomb and American landscape painting” \cite{griffin1999}
Perhaps her most well know work however, is her 2004 series: Riot. Like all of Garnett’s work, Riot is comprised of paintings of photographs. In her 2005 essay, Follow the Image, Garnett explains her process: 
 
“I am crazy for images. I spend part of every day trolling the Web, collecting photographs and video stills... Because images in the media go by quickly, I feel compelled to stop them and keep them from slipping away. Once an image is isolated on my monitor I can control it; by printing it out I make it ‘mine,’ ... of course, these images are hardly mine; I am just one of many potential authors ... I tend to let my printouts sit for a while in folders. As time goes by their original context becomes difficult to remember ... they gradually become more generalized ... My artwork taps into the media narrative in order to turn it into something else; I slow it down and rework bits of it. The resulting paintings are infused with
this narrative, yet they function slowly and ambiguously
on some obscure, yet intimate level...” \cite{garnett2005}  
For the Riot series, she searched for images of “figures in extreme emotional or physical states” \cite{meiselas2007} Garnett and the directors of the gallery where the show took place agreed that her painting “Molotov,” was emblematic of the series, and should be used for the announcement card. This image, and the ensuing debate between the photographer who took the picture, Susan Meiselas, and the painter, Joy Garnett, is at the heart of our question. 
As previously stated, Meiselas took the photograph on her first trip to Nicaragua on July 16, 1979. At the time Garnett found the image, and later when she painted it, she was unaware of the context surrounding the image. In fact, the photograph that she originally downloaded was a cropped version procured from, “some anarchist website” \cite{Garnett2005}. About half way through the show, Ms. Garnett was contacted by an acquaintance who informed her that the image on the announcement card, Molotov, was actually the property of Susan Meiselas and Magnum Photography, and he inquired as to whether she had acquired permission to reproduce it. After a bit of research, Garnett discovered that the photo was, “part of a well known photo essay shot in the 1970s ... a form that straddles reportage and art” \cite{Garnett2005}. A week after the show closed, Garnett received a letter from Meiselas’s lawyer asking that she give credit to the source in any exhibition of the painting and that she agree to seek written permission from Meiselas before making any further reproductions. \cite{Meiselas2007} 
After consulting with her attorney, and an online community of which she was a
member (Rhyizome.org), Garnett responded to Meiselas’s lawyer agreeing to give credit for the photograph. She refused however to seek permission before making any further reproductions (3). Meiselas’s lawyer responded with, “a much longer letter that cited cases to support Susan’s position and requested a $2,000 licensing fee for the additional uses ...”\cite{Meiselas2007} Additionally, Meiselas’s lawyer asserted that the image must be removed from both Garnett’s and the gallery’s websites. However, “this didn’t seem to be about money; it was about control... most emphatically, they wanted to know where I had found the ‘pirated’ image. The unauthorized existence of images, whether they be online thumbnails of my painting or unattributed fragments of the original photograph, seemed to be at the heart of the matter here” \cite{Garnett2005}
Frightened, Garnett opted to remove the image from her website. What happened
next however, is quite intriguing. A few days after Garnett announced her decision to remove the image to her compatriots on Rhizome, she learned that an artist named Tim Whidden
 had created a copy or “mirror” of her website on his own server. After he shared the link on Rhizome, several other followed suit. Next an artist by the name of Mark River reused a section of Molotov and made a collage, “depicting this act of mirroring" \cite{Meiselas2007}
This type of mass appropriation was 
simply not possible before the age of the 
internet, however, appropriation in art is a
much older phenomenon. It dates back, at
least in its most explicit form, to the early 1900s \cite{Chilvers_2009} \cite{elger2015}. Perhaps the first formal record of
intentional appropriation of objects from a non-art context in a piece was created in 1912 when Pablo Picasso pasted a piece of oilcloth onto his canvas. This was followed closely by another of Picasso’s pieces, Guitar, Newspaper, Glass and Bottle (1913). This style later became known as synthetic cubism \cite{elger2015}. Perhaps more immediately relevant to our discussion however, is the work of Marcel Duchamp. 
Duchamp pioneered the concept of “Readymade,” which is a branch of art in which, “industrially produced utilitarian objects...achieve the status of art merely through the process of selection and presentation" \cite{elger2015}. That is to say, the art lies not in the creation of the physical piece, but in the selection of it; the art is choosing. The classic example of this is Duchamp’s Fountain (1917). In 1917, Duchamp formally submitted a Readymade to the Society of Independent Artists under the pseudonym R. Mutt. The piece was an upended urinal placed atop a stool and signed, “R. Mutt 1917.” The piece flew in the face of everything fine art was considered to be at that time, and in addition to arousing much outrage and derision from many in the art community at the time, it was rejected by the exhibition committee \cite{stafford}. Duchamp publicly defended the piece stating, “whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He chose it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view-- and created a new thought for that object” \cite{Stafford}
If the act of choosing is indeed itself art, then one could argue that even though Susan Meiselas captured the original image, Joy Garnett chose it, and by choosing it, and assigning new meaning to it, she created new art. And in fact, she went even farther than Duchamp, because she did not simply choose it, but first chose, and then reproduced it in her own vision, creating for that image, a new thought.
Perhaps even a better example of Duchamp’s work in this
context is his painting L.H.O.O.Q., in another early example
of appropriation (1919), Duchamp penciled a beard and
mustache onto a postcard depicting the Mona Lisa, in doing so he, according to some, was attempting to ask the art world, as with much of his work, to question its definition of
fine art.
Of course, this concept of reuse in art extends far beyond that small community in the early 1900s. Perhaps the most obvious example
in visual art is collage, but the concept extends beyond visual art; it is quite prevalent in music as well. Take for example, a short drum solo, a fill really, performed in 1969 by Gregory Coleman, the drummer for the 60s funk and soul group, The Winstons. The fill occurred just past the two-minute mark of the song “Amen Brother” (which is itself a cover of an older gospel song) and lasted just under six seconds. Those six seconds, which would become known as the Amen Break, are by far, the most sampled six seconds in music.
The sample first gained recognition when an individual known as “Break Beat Lenny” compiled it onto his 1986 bootleg record  Ultimate Breaks and Beats. Lenny, slowed the tempo of the break way down, so DJs could extend it at a danceable tempo by fading between two copies of the record on separate turntables while disregarding the rest of the song (a technique popularized by Grandmaster Flash). In 1987, the SP1200 sampler hit the market, and almost overnight, the Amen Break was everywhere. From the beat of NWA’s Straight Outta Compton to the theme music of the cartoon Futurama, from Oasis’s D’You Know What I Mean to Lennie de Ice’s We Are I.E. , and from Nine Inch Nails The Perfect Drug, to David Bowie’s Little Wonder. This sample is ubiquitous. In fact, it spawned at least two whole genres of music / subcultures: Breakbeat, Jungle, and Drum-and-Bass music all have the Amen Break basically embed in their definitions. Without the ability to sample and reuse other works, Electronic Dance Music, Hip-Hop, Rap, and Rock and Roll would simply not be the same \cite{beat}.
The Oxford Living Dictionary defines Culture as, “The arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively,” and Intelligence, “The ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills.” This ability of the human brain to acquire some finite subset of collective human achievement and rearrange and reapply the constituent parts in a new way is in some sense the essence of creativity, innovation, and cultural progress.
In his essay “Robot Historians and the Hummingbird’s Wing”, Steven Johnson encapsulates this concept of rearrangement and combination with an anecdote regarding the physicist Richard Feynman and an artist friend of his. The artist will, “hold up a flower and say ‘Look how beautiful it is,’ and I’ll [Feynman] agree. Then he says, ‘I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing” \cite{johnson2014}. Feynman responds saying, “I think he’s kind of nutty” \cite{Johnson2014}. He then expands detailing that beauty exists on many scales, and much of it is only perceptible through the lens of the collective knowledge built up by previous human achievement. Though it is perhaps more explicit when Joy Garnet paints a picture of Susan Meiselas’s photo, it is not so different from the way Feynman is able to draw on the lenses of other’s discoveries and creations to see the beauty in the other layers of the flower not directly available to our eyes. Each of us is creating a piece, a small sliver of, “The arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement,” and no one of us can fully appreciate our position in it, but collectively, by reordering and reapplying our own subset of culture, we expand upon it and create it anew.