I tore a copy of another iconic FSA photograph from a museum brochure. I taped it up and stared at it while I stretched on the yoga mat in my tiny apartment. There was no escaping her eyes, her thin lips. I looked at her dress. Homemade and, I’d read, designed, as all her dresses were, to allow for breastfeeding, since every year she had a new infant who needed nursing.

She had a name, this woman with the thin lips, as well as an alias she’d been given by Walker Evans and James Agee when they photographed her and her family and their homes in Alabama for Fortune magazine.

So she was probably copyrighted. And she was iconic. Being an icon meant losing your identity as an individual if you were the subject of the photograph. But if you were the creator, the photographer, then your copyrighted work appreciated in value if the image was deemed iconic. I remembered something I’d seen in a Russian art book, an icon with the inscription on the back: “Not painted by human hands.”

So I would need permission to use or change this image. . . or was I forbidden to touch it? Just as I might, now, be forbidden from using the phrase “The Human Bond” because Nuveen Investment Company has trademarked that phrase in order to sell their services to wealthy clients. And the beautiful things I cut out of the catalogs of Williams-Sonoma, Pottery Barn, Restoration Hardware—the retailers sent these things into my home so I could want them, not take them. Their images of lamps and duvet covers and flower petals sparkling with dew were not my property.