How a photo I took in 2001 ended up on Desperate Housewives

... and what it means for your privacy in the AI age

Here's a story to illustrate how you never know where a photo you put online is likely to end up.

I started my media life as a photographer. In 1996, aided by my dad’s friend, landscape photographer Giles Norman, I bought my first SLR and began teaching myself photography. Because I spent a lot of time in boats, and because my childhood hero was legendary sailing photographer Rick Tomlinson, I took a lot of sailing photos. In 2001 I took a photo on a film camera of a sailing event in Dublin Bay. In the photo were two friends of mine, Conor and James. It’s a great shot, lighting and action and full faces, on the crest of a wave - it’s one of the ones I’m most proud of.

I had just been given a scanner for my 21st birthday, so I scanned the picture and, to share it with friends in the pre-social media days, I uploaded it to a website called Webshots. Webshots has since been shut down, resold, resold again and all of the images thereon were consigned to the dustbin of the Internet. Or so you might think.

A few years later, Conor, who appeared in the photo, claimed that he saw the photo appear on screen while he was watching Desperate Housewives. He said that he had seen the picture in a picture frame on set in one of the houses on Wisteria Lane. “I used it as a chat up line all through college,” he told me recently.

At the time it was burdensome to chase down and fact check his rumor. This was before the age of on-demand television, before my sleuthing days at Storyful, and to hunt down the claim I’d have to buy a DVD box set or find another way to watch back the entire series. If that image did exist somewhere on set, it wasn’t being distributed far and wide. I dismissed the claim as just an optical illusion or some other similar photo that was used in set dressing at the time. We thought little of it and by the time the social media age came along, we were distracted by many other things.

On a whim recently, I threw the photo and the theory into Reddit – specifically r/desperatehousewives – to see if any of the desperate housewives obsessives on there could confirm or debunk this decades-old rumor. Within 30 minutes, I had my answer.

It was true. The photo had been used in an altered form, with Conor photoshopped out, the photo reversed horizontally, and the head of actor Doug Savant superimposed on James’ body. There it was, plain as day on the mantelpiece of Lynne Scavo's house on Wisteria Lane as she argued with her husband over how they’d pay school fees. I confirmed it with a quick scroll through the show on Disney+. (Season 1, Episode 5, at the 32m33s mark, if you’re interested).

A few people doubted it but even a cursory bit of ‘spot the difference’ confirms it’s my photo. The repaired rip on the foot of the spinnaker, the tab of the windbreaker dangling from his writs, the way the lines intersect, and the way the horizon cuts his hip just below his elbow.

That’s my pic.

In the episode, the Scavos came to the realization they’d be selling their boat to educate the kids. So they had to establish his bona fides as a sailor. Alongside the pic of his yacht, was a photo of ‘him’ in a dinghy, earning his stripes, except it was Conor & James’ dinghy, with his head stitched on like Dogman.

SO, HOW’D IT GET THERE?

The likelihood is that Webshots sold on the rights to their archive, along with my lo-res sailing pic, where it was lifted by a production designer. There’s also a chance they just went digging for images that were unlikely to be chased down for licensing fees, altering them enough that the chances of discover were incredibly small. From the reddit thread, there’s a description of how the photos were sourced and altered, rather than paying for shoots to fill out characters’ back stories.

I’ve reached out to people who worked on the show, people who reported on people who worked on the show, and people from Webshots. Nobody wants to talk about it.

The fact that a random photo of a small sailing event in Dublin could be photoshopped, reused and end up in one of the most popular TV shows of all time just goes to show that you really do never know where anything you post online is going to end up or how it's going to be used.

Fast forward 20 years and celebrities and lesser figures are now figuring that out to their detriment. The difference is nowadays we document our lives on granular level. With digital cameras in our pockets, we post selfies, we share photos on Instagram, and all of us are likely to be immortalized online with images of our face or videos of ourselves appearing in multiple places, across all platforms. Every time we post something online we lose control of it immediately. Are we all reading the T&Cs of every platform? Do you know who really owns the rights to your instagram grid? Do you REALLY? And do you think everyone’s complying with those terms? Be honest with yourself.

Harmless, you might think. Harmless in this specific case, at least. Harmless until someone uses that video or a single photo of you as the Genesis for AI generated nude pictures or worse, to create pornographic videos with your head on a body generated in the Internet on a server rack somewhere for the titillation of others.

Sounds dystopian, like something out of black mirror, but this is the reality that is faced by celebrities and now normal people, and will become an easier and easier thing for malevolent actors to create as time goes on. There are literally apps to create virtual porn from photos. More so than ever, all content posted online has the potential to end up anywhere and everywhere extremely fast.

The minute you put anything online, or allow anything of yours to be put online, you are giving up a large element of control immediately, and forever. You are yielding your privacy and your sovereignty over your image. If you’re posting images of your kids on social - you’re yielding their privacy and exposing them to this risk too.

As we press on into the AI age, where it’s easier than ever to create a digital twin of anything in the physical world, the easier it becomes to create & fake a digital version of you. And the more content featuring you that exists on servers that you don’t personally control, there more there is to make those fakes accurate. Any public YouTube video you appear in, any TikTok reel or instagram video, however fleeting or ephemeral, exists somewhere and contains biometric and contextual data points on you that can be used to extrapolate other versions of you.

Back in the days this pic was taken, which doesn’t seem all that long ago, none of thought we had to worry about where images of us would end up. The odds of a film photo travelling halfway around the world and getting distributed globally were pretty slim, which is why this feels like such an edge case. But now, your daughter’s selfie, that fun podcast you did with your neighbor, even your linkedin profile pic can be weaponised. Act accordingly.