While Rentmeester insists he’s never estimated how much money he missed out on when Nike commissioned its own Jumpman image, Jordan himself is believed to have made over $1.5 billion from the Air Jordan brand over the past three decades. Both the photographer and Dey were quick to say they don’t believe the now-retired player played any conscious role in orchestrating the overlap between the two pictures.
“I can only be positive about his involvement in my shoot,” Rentmeester said. “He was a gentleman; he listened to me and did his best. Afterward, I never heard from him again. He had a major contract worth millions of dollars, so I feel like he had to listen to Nike.”
“I would love to hear from Jordan more than Nike [today]—just to see what his memories are,” Dey added. “I don’t know if he would ever want to [comment] because that brand is such a golden goose.”
While Jordan has never commented on Rentmeester’s claims directly, he did discuss Kuhn’s photo in a 1997 issue of Hoop magazine that is not available online. According to ABC News and ESPN, the photographer’s suit claimed that interview backed up his assertion that Jordan was performing a ballet move in the Nike-commissioned version of Jumpman.
Having worked in the advertising world himself as a director, Dey sees his father-in-law’s story as a “cautionary tale” for other artists whose work attracts the attention of major brands and corporations. “I absolutely believe that brands have an obligation to respect the authorship of creators,” he argued. “It’s in their best interest to do so and to have a productive and creative collaboration with creators. When there’s a baseline of respect that goes both ways, everybody wins.”
Finding that baseline is even more urgent at a time when young artists have ready access to high quality cameras via their smartphones, while also watching the proliferation of AI images in real time. In that climate, Dey said a photograph needs to be treated as “more than the sum of its parts.”
“If you break down the individual components of any piece of art, like a poem or a painting—as what happened during our lawsuit—you’re going to be able to find differences,” the director said. “But we feel that it’s important to look at these things holistically. In this instance, that didn’t happen, and it caused great harm to the artist.”
Postgame thoughts
For his part, Rentmeester said he largely had positive relationships with his advertising clients during the course of his career, and appreciated that they always had a “very strict directive” for what they were looking for.
“It’s very disciplined work,” he noted. “I never got into any conflicts before this because I was just working for a client. Life magazine was my client [for the Jordan picture], and how it was distorted and taken away from me was a very painful period that I had to go through.”
Dey’s film does make clear that Rentmeester’s life and legacy extend well beyond his tangled history with Nike. “I’ve been blessed,” the photographer says in the documentary’s final moments. “I hope other young people will look at the situation and say, ‘Photography is an art, and it should be protected.’”
