Who Invented Oscar Wilde?: The Photograph at the Center of Modern American Copyright

AAP PROSE Award, Finalist in Media and Culture Studies 2021

In early 1882, before young Oscar Wilde embarked on his lecture tour across America, he posed for publicity photos taken by a famously eccentric New York photographer named Napoleon Sarony. Few would guess that one of those photographs would become the subject of the Supreme Court case that challenged copyright protection for all photography—a constitutional question that asked how a machine-made image could possibly be a work of h...