Photographer alleges Nike stole his image for Air Jordan brand

That’s when a 21-year-old participant from the College of North Carolina was requested to leap towards the basket, ball in hand and carry out a grand jete—the basic ballet transfer the place a dancer jumps and spreads their legs huge. That younger man was Michael Jordan and his pose would go on to change into the emblem for the $6 billion model that, to today, bears his identify. 

In a brand new quick documentary titled Jumpman that premiered on the Tribeca movie competition, the photographer who took that image, Jacobus “Co” Rentmeester, alleges his work was copied to create the well-known brand. 

“There is a certain brutality by major corporations,” Rentmeester advised Fortune. “They just acquire what they think they need—that’s fine—but then they don’t want to accept the sharing of the creative process. They just want to take it and drop the rest in the garbage.” 

Tom Dey, the director of the film and Rentmeester’s son-in-law, stated the image of Jordan “wildly succeeded in his goal, which is that it will never be forgotten, but it exacted a great personal price” on Rentmeester, who’s now 88. “So there’s great irony in that for me.”

Nike didn’t reply to a request for remark.

Corporations usually take nice care in safeguarding their logos, that are among the many most crucial items of branding and change into shortcuts for tens of millions (if not billions) of customers worldwide. Now not only a sketch meant to attract a client’s wandering eye in a retailer, a brand is now a illustration of a model’s values, its means to join with individuals. It ought to, in idea, symbolize one thing. 

Nonetheless, that stage of visibility additionally makes them prime candidates for the authorized battles—both between firms complaining their logos are too comparable or from a designer claiming they have been ripped off. A number of well-known logos have been alleged to have been replicated from different firms that preceded them, often inadvertently. Whereas different instances creators for rent, like Rentmeester, really feel they haven’t obtained their justifiable share. 

Photographing Michael Jordan, a ‘man without gravity’

In Rentmeester’s case, the photograph he initially took was commissioned by Life journal, a publication recognized for working with famend photographers like Robert Capa and Margaret Bourke-White. An elite athlete himself, Rentmeester represented his native Holland as a rower on the 1960 Olympics in Rome, earlier than turning into a photographer. Over his profession, Rentmeester photographed the Vietnam Struggle, the 1972 Olympics, and the Watts Riots, with a few of his work showing in Fortune when it was nonetheless owned by Time Inc. 

For the Jordan task, Life needed one thing barely uncommon. “I was asked to do a photo essay of athletes in outstanding situations,” Rentmeester advised Adweek, describing his task. 

As an alternative of placing Jordan on a basketball court docket, Rentmeester determined to {photograph} him open air, towards the backdrop of a transparent, blue sky together with his legs and arms splayed out. The thought was to seize Jordan’s athleticism as if it have been flight. “A person in the air without gravity in the frame,” he recalled. 

That image, Rentmeester stated, was then used as the premise for a later photoshoot commissioned by Nike and shot by photographer Chuck Kuhn. In Kuhn’s {photograph}, Jordan is seen in the same pose over the Chicago metropolis skyline vaulting towards an outside basketball hoop with an aluminum backboard and steel netting. Notably, on this model Jordan is carrying Nike sneakers relatively than the New Stability ones he wore in Rentmeester’s image. 

Years later, within the late Eighties when Rentmeester was on task for Marlboro scouting areas in Painted Desert, Nevada, he crossed paths with Kuhn when the 2 occurred to be staying in the identical motel. 

Nike ‘had snookered me’

The culprits, Rentmeester and Dey declare, have been the Nike artwork administrators who reneged on a promise to credit score him for his work. An advert company working for Nike had reached out to Rentmeester for a print of his {photograph}. He agreed to ship over copies of his work in alternate for $150 and an settlement his work wouldn’t be copied or duplicated, in line with correspondence seen by Fortune. “They ignored that obviously,” Rentmeester stated.

Two weeks later, whereas taking a cab from Chicago’s O’Hare airport to the workplaces of advert company Leo Burnett, Rentmeester noticed a billboard with a strikingly comparable picture: a balletic Jordan spread-eagle, hovering towards a basketball hoop. 

Upon realizing this, Rentmeester threatened to sue Nike. “In my mind, it was completely a fraud case,” Rentmeester stated. “They had snookered me.” 

He ultimately backed down. In March 1985, Rentmeester as an alternative accepted $15,000 for a two-year license to make use of his image in North America, in line with an bill seen by Fortune. That settlement was by no means renewed after it expired 37 years in the past, Dey wrote in an electronic mail. “They kept using it all these years without coming back to me,” Rentmeester stated. 

In 2015, Rentmeester made good on his menace of authorized motion, suing Nike in federal court docket in Oregon, the place the corporate is predicated. However that lawsuit left Rentmeester with out the credit score he had hoped for. The decide within the case didn’t grant him the jury trial Rentmeester sought, ruling the 2 images have been totally different sufficient as to have been separate works. Rentmeester ultimately appealed the case to the Supreme Court docket, which declined to reopen it, upholding a ruling from the Ninth Circuit Court docket.  

“I felt very restricted because as a single individual taking on the law firms that Nike could produce, there seemed like very little chance that I would go far,” Rentmeester stated. “They simply ignored me because they felt they were powerful enough to just throw me under the bus in a certain way.” 

Corporations have been accused of copying logos earlier than

Nike’s Air Jordan brand is hardly the primary company brand to change into embroiled in allegations of copying. 

In 2014, Airbnb discovered that its triangular formed brand was nearly an identical to that of software program firm Automation Wherever. On the time, Airbnb stated it was a coincidence the 2 have been so comparable. Ultimately Automation Wherever modified its brand, whereas Airbnb saved the one it nonetheless makes use of as we speak. 

Air Jordan’s mother or father firm, Nike, had its famed swoosh brand designed by a school pupil in 1971. Carolyn Davidson, a design pupil at Portland State College, was requested by Nike founder Phil Knight (who on the time was instructing accounting on the college) if she’d be keen to do some graphic design for his then-fledgling shoe firm, she advised ABC Information in 2016. Ultimately Knight picked the swoosh, which “he didn’t love,” in line with Davidson. For her work, Davidson charged Knight $35. He would later reward her some Nike inventory and a swoosh-shaped ring. 

Davidson although is sanguine concerning the position she performed in designing what would change into one of the crucial recognizable logos on this planet.  “While I’m proud of what I did, in some way I see it as just another design,” she advised ABC. “It was Phil and the workers at Nike that turned the enterprise into what it was. In the event that they didn’t have the savvy, it might have been simply one other drawing.“

Rentmeester, who was conscious of Davidson’s story, stated he was by no means proven that kind of good religion from Nike. If he had been, then maybe the years of animosity and lingering sense of injustice could have been averted.

“The irony is that had they just hired him to retake his picture none of this would have happened,” Dey stated.