Photographer Janine "Jah Jah" Gordon has levied a lawsuit against fellow photographer and rising contemporary art star Ryan McGinleyalleging that the younger artist stole her visual style and subject matter — infringements that Janine feels deserve monetary recompense to the tune of $30,000 per "copied" artwork, writes Artnet's Rachel Corbett. The question is, can any artist really copyright naked hipsters and color tints?

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York against Ryan McGinley and Levi's, targets 150 of McGinley's works, ranging from commercial shots for the jeans giant and other companies to earlier pieces by the artist. In a surprising turn, star curator Dan Cameronhas supported Gordon's case in an affidavit, stating that "Ryan McGinley has derived much of his work from [Gordon's] creations."

Copyright lawsuits have recently run rampant, from Jeff Koons attempting a monopoly on balloon dogs and Richard Prince's Rastafarian fiasco to origami artist Robert J. Lang's lawsuit filed against Sarah Morris. So far, only Prince's case has settled against the artist, in favor of photographer Patrick Cariou,the creator of the appropriated photographs. Gordon's case hinges on a similar idea: that Ryan McGinley could not have created his photographs without looking at Gordon's.

ARTINFO spoke to Gordon on the telephone to get her take on the case. The photographer has "begged [McGinley] to stop" copying her work since the 1990s, through dealer and close friend Chris Perez, butMcGinley has never formally responded to the accusations. Previous reports cited the fact that Gordon and McGinley installed shows at the Whitneyin quick succession as well as an anecdote about McGinley fleeing Gordon at a party as evidence of McGinley's theft, even though Gordon didn't yet know McGinley or his work at that point. "I had no idea why he ran from me," she says.

From Gordon's point of view, she sees McGinley taking subject matter andaesthetic strategy from her in the form of poses, compositions, and photography processes, possibly transmitted to McGinley by dealer Perez,who was close to both photographers. The lawsuit includes a document, sent to ARTINFO in an email, with 150 examples of McGinley's work as compared to Gordon's, dissecting what Gordon sees as visual thefts. Similarities include such tropes as "boy looking upward, mouth slightly open in an expression of awe," and "subject's left arm is in the air angling above his head."

Taken individually, it's hard to see the similarities as anything but incidental — artists can't copyright a pose any more than they can copyright balloon dogs. From the document, it's clear that McGinley's style is certainly similar to Gordon's, but that is inevitable in tight-knit artistic milieus. She claims that McGinley took the "style, idea, composition, backgrounds, foregrounds, expressions, gestures" of her work, but none of the image comparisons bear up to the designation of exact copy.

Gordon has worked with galleries including Mitchell Innes & Nash, White Columns, and Berlin's Volker Diehl Galerie,but has never arrived at — or, according to her own account, even aspired to — McGinley's celebrity position at the top of the heap. It sucks to be upstaged, but in the stew of the fashionable avant garde, it's pretty much impossible to tell who came up with what, and people riff on and incorporate each other's style in substantial ways all the time.

The Cariou case, in which Richard Prince literally chopped exact images out of the photographer's book, opened up the floodgates for artists to claim that their contemporaries stole from them. But there are realisticcases, and then there are wishful ones. This one falls into the latter:the point remains that McGinley never wholly lifted Gordon's images; atthe worst, he riffed off of a hot style and ran with it, all the way tothe bank.

To see Gordon's side-by-side comparisons of her work with McGinley's, click on the slide show at the left. 

Update: It has come to our attention that several pieces of Gordon's evidence are in error: In the kissing comparison slide, Ryan McGinley's photograph is from 2004, and so was shot before Gordon's. In the final image comparison slide, the photo attributed to McGinley is actually a photograph by Cass Bird. For more information, please see our In the Air post on the errors. We presented selections from the evidence court document as it was sent to us by Gordon.