Something About Mary — One of Them, at Least
Periodically, publishers both online and traditional will trawl through Flickr looking for photos to illustrate whatever article or book they’re currently doing. Some people seem to be annoyed by this, seeing the publishers as being too cheap to shell out for professional photography; being in publishing myself, I am all too sympathetic to the publishers — though this is less of a problem at my current (nonprofit) employer, in commercial publishing there’s often little or no budget for professional editing or indexing, let alone illustration, and though the editors and authors would, I’m sure, love to hire professionals to get exactly what they have in mind, they do the best they can with what resources they have. As long as they ask first (or, if it’s for nonprofit use, let me know), and it’s not going to be used for something I personally find repugnant, I’m usually fine with it.
On the other hand, sometimes their lack of preparation takes me aback. Today, for instance, I got a very nice but very confusing e-mail from someone working on a children’s history book about the Tudors. I’m all for that, but I was a little perplexed when they asked if they could use my photo of Mary Tudor’s tomb. Firstly, I wasn’t sure which Mary Tudor they meant — Mary I, elder daughter of Henry VIII, or her aunt and Henry’s sister, also named Mary Tudor, who married the Dauphin and then Charles Brandon. Both rather sympathetic characters, in their own ways; even “Bloody Mary” was, I suspect, only trying to do what she was convinced was right, and certainly had enough personal tragedy in her life to earn a fair amount of sympathy. Given that I’ve never been to the latter’s tomb, I suspected the former — except that Mary I is buried in the same tomb as her half-sister Elizabeth I, and doesn’t have her own effigy at all. (This may explain why the publisher mentioned they’d been having difficulty finding an illustration of Mary Tudor’s tomb: the effigy on her tomb would, in fact, look remarkably like Elizabeth.*)
Secondly, Mary I and Elizabeth I are buried in Westminster Abbey, which no longer allows photography. I do have some photographs from my first trip there in 1998, but they haven’t been posted. What I do have, and what I suspect the publisher might have meant, is the following photograph of a copy of Mary, Queen of Scots’ tomb:
So, perhaps most importantly, not a Tudor, though definitely a Mary, and definitely alive during the late Tudor era — though, of course, by the very late Tudor era she was, also, very late as well. Also not her real tomb, but a replica thereof, which is why I was able to get so close (my camera at the time only had what I called “bipedal zoom,” meaning that, in order to zoom in or out, you had to rely on your feet to move you closer or further away).
It’s a bit worrying. I’m all for helping out other publishers when I can, especially for projects I find worthwhile — and history is definitely worthwhile to me. I just want to make sure that photographs (particularly if they’re mine) actually show what they purport to show. There’s also the vague paranoia that, if something I took of a copy were published with the note that it was of the actual original, then someone at Westminster Abbey would sort through their records of photography permission, discover that I’m not on the list of people granted photography rights since the ban, and then blacklist me forever. o.O
Anyway, I’m off to sort through my old photo prints, to see whether I actually have anything usable of Elizabeth and Mary’s joint tomb from my 1998 trip.
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*On that same 1998 trip, an American tourist at Westminster Abbey asked one of the docents if “that’s James I’s tomb.” He nodded, so she snapped a photograph of the effigy and walked away. What just completely floored me was that she didn’t notice the fact that the effigy was actually of Henry VII, who, although one of James I’s ancestors, (1) looked absolutely, completely different; (2) had an obviously late medieval haircut; (3) was sculpted in an equally obviously late medieval style; and (3) was wearing clothes that had gone out of fashion 100 years before James came to the English throne. Freakin’ moronic American pillock of a tourist. No wonder people think we’re twits.
