Hello,
I am an English teacher from Minnesota in need of some advice. I
am writing a textbook for publication for high school students to help
them in their writing. I am highlighting accomplished authors and Ray
Bradbury is one of them. I have gotten permission from many places to
use pictures of every author I am highlighting except for Ray. There are
many good ones of him on google.com but are they in public domain? How
do I secure a photo of Ray to accent his life for my book?
Please advise if you can.

Sincerely,
Jay W. Patterson
English Faculty
Wadena-Deer Creek High School
Wadena, MN 56482

Jay,

it is impossible to tell whether the images found on/by Google are copyrighted. You would need to look at the web page they are linked to, and then trust that the author of the web page was the legitimate copyright holder (unlikely in most cases).

Do you like any of the photos of Ray that appear on the covers of his books? If so, you could contact the publisher of that particular book and ask if they would let you use it. HarperCollins seem to be his main publishers of late. Contact details:

HarperCollins Publishers Inc
10 East 53rd Street
New York
NY 10022

If you haven't yet found a photo you like, perhaps you could look out for Jerry Weist's book "Bradbury: An Illustrated Life" (Harper Collins, 2002). This is an absolute treasury of images of Ray and his work, spanning almost his whole life.

- Phil

[This message has been edited by philnic (edited 03-31-2004).]

Whittier:

I have a bunch of pictures of Ray that are NOT on my website...that I have taken recently and years past. If you wish, I could fax some of them over to you for you to choose...after which I could send you a fine print for you to reproduce from; or you could use something from my website:
www.catchaway.com (Go to the Bradbury page).

Hey, no charge, either....