But for the record, there is recent good news about what has now changed its name to the Lan Su Chinese Garden at http://www.lansugarden.org and at 3rd and Everett in Portland, OR.

While renewing my membership tonight, I noticed that Lan Su have now adopted the “Photographer Member” paradigm and the same $150 annual photography membership fee as the Portland Japanese Garden. I had been putting off contacting them to talk about publication, precisely in the hope they would go this route. My faith in the positive power of procrastination has been vindicated.

Another thought, we do have a huge and incredibly beautiful variety of natural areas to photograph around Portland. Forest Park has some great spots, as well as the coast, the gorge and the area around Mt Hood. And it’s all free to photograph and do whatever you wish with the photos, we all own it as public property.

You may not realize it, but the Chinese Garden in Portland asserts blanket copyright to every photo taken in their garden. (It’s in the membership material and policy statements.) Even the photos currently in Wikipedia are technically violations of their policy. The folks at PCCG are almost within their rights to do this, since that garden was constructed after 1990. As such it is unquestionably a copyrighted work of construction/art. Of course copyright is not quite THAT contagious. Every professional photographer knows that a photo in which a statue appears is not automatically copyright by the creator of the statue, although publication does technically require a release from the copyright-holders of all statues or other works of art appearing in the photograph.

Of course it’s crazy to get caught up in arguing the legalities. Especially considering the problems the Chinese Garden has had achieving its traffic targets, they ought to be PAYING people to take photos and post them everywhere on the Internet. (That’s only half serious, because then it would be work for hire and they would definitively own the copyright.) There was seriously sclerotic thinking behind the original photo policy and I hope it is finally changing. What were they afraid of — that people might actually discover they have something interesting in there and go visit? That they might become victims of more good publicity and traffic than they could ever afford to buy? That some tea company would put that particular teahouse on millions of boxes of tea? (And that would hurt the Garden exactly how, again?)

Plus it takes a signed contract to validly transfer a copyright from the creator of the work to them, which they ought to have known. At most, they should have gone with the traditional property-release method of controlling publication. But really, the smart thing would be to encourage every visitor to self-publish photos of their visit and every professional photographer they could lasso to publish a coffee table book. I’ve found that for many small gardens and estates, some with more acreage than either of these undeniably exquisite gardens, the people I negotiate with for publication rights say that Internet word-of-mouth is their first or second most important source of visitors these days.

The Chinese Garden has two new directors now, and I hope this will lead (maybe has already led?) to more intelligent and productive publication policies. Their old one was like sealing a butterfly in an opaque and air-tight bottle so nobody would steal unauthorized glimpses of its beauty.

Back to the Japanese Garden, I’m surprised you haven’t run into this before. Yes, more and more gardens today do actively encourage publication, especially with circulation collapsing for the monthly and weekly media that used to bring them more visitors. But if you’ve been publishing stuff from admission-fee gardens without property releases, you’re _awfully_ damned lucky someone hasn’t tried to haul you into court for a big percentage of your revenue from it. Maybe over 100%. And at that point, whether you are right or wrong, whether you win or lose — you lose. A lot of money in legal fees, if nothing else. And a lot of gray hair.