A Collage of Chess Collages

If a picture is worth a thousand words, what are two pictures worth? Ten pictures? A hundred pictures? Last month I used a new (for me) technique to explore the topic of Bogart and Chess in Photos. Based on a snapshot of a Google image search, it was easy to reference individual images, to document their visual connections with other images, and to investigate their origins on the web. The referencing goes something like this:-

Let's use chess notation to identify the three rows of six images. Calling the rows 'A' to 'C' (from top to bottom) and numbering the images in each row '1' to '6' (from left to right).

Here's another example.

Google image search on 'chess collage'

The image in the top row, left ('A1') is from Chess club in a collage (chess.com), where someone meant 'college', but typed 'collage', and someone else gave an example of a chess collage. This must be a common mistake, because Google confirms 'collage' before executing the search.

The image in the bottom row, right ('C5') is from Marcel Dzama: A Game of Chess (seesaa.net). The original image is titled 'The Hyper-modern Revolution' (2011), and is explained as 'Diorama: wood, glass, cardboard, paper, collage, watercolor and ink'. The rest of the page is full of unusual chess imagery. As for the other images in the collage of collages they all tell other stories.

As far as I can tell, I first used the Google image technique (I often call it a 'composite' image) in A Contest With No Prize (September 2012). Lately I've been using it more frequently, for example:-

• A Chess Allegory (November 2016), 'chess donald trump'; and
• Win a Million Bucks (September 2017), 'chess eight queens'

I've also used the composite technique in other contexts, like:-

• Olympiad Veterans (October 2016), Flickr Friday;
• As Seen on 'Mad Men' (February 2016), Top eBay Items; and
• Bobby's Big Hands (December 2015)

What copyright issues are involved? I really don't know. Google freely uses the images returned by a search, without permission from the owning sites. If the owner of an image asked me to remove it (which has happened twice in the 20 years that I've been creating material for the web), I would have to research the question of 'fair use' in this specific context. In the meantime, I have a few other ideas for chess collages.