Erik Moeller wrote:
Photographs of objects like paintings have no
substantial expressive
content of their own with very few exceptions of obvious lighting and
retouching jobs (and even then it's controversial), which is required by
US copyright law. Do not let cultural pirates who try to steal from the
public domain fool you into thinking otherwise. If these people had their
way, we would have no art to write about, because it would all be locked
in museums, only accessible after signing non disclosure agreements, and
officially be distributed by the new "copyright holders", under DRM
protection, of course.
However, you do need to make sure it is not a creative work -- there are
some cases (albeit relatively infrequent) where significant modification
has been done beyond merely taking a photograph. The most common is
probably 'reconstructive' retouching, where a damaged or faded painting
is modified to look like it supposedly would have looked like when it
was first painted. This is probably significant enough to merit a
separate copyright, but when this has been done the source also usually
mentions it.
Much more problematic than paintings though, are three-dimensional works
of art like sculptures. With them it is much easier to argue that a
photograph of a sculpture is a separate creative work, since there is no
one way to map a three-dimensional sculpture onto a two-dimensional
photograph. So you probably can't scan photographs of sculptures from
art books, which is problematic for us getting any photographs at all,
as you normally can't take your own either (due to museum policies).
-Mark