Mara Okonjo has shot editorial and commercial work for fifteen years. She started signing her deliveries eighteen months ago, at first because a client asked, and then for reasons of her own. We spoke about what changed.
ODDR You did not come to this because you were worried about AI. What was the actual trigger?
Mara A licensing dispute, and a boring one. An agency used a set past the licence period and said the files came from a different shoot. I knew they were mine. Proving it took four weeks of digging through drive backups and email threads.
ODDR Would signed files have shortened that?
Mara To about ten minutes. The dispute was never really about authorship in a philosophical sense. It was about whether I could produce something checkable faster than they could produce doubt.
ODDR What does your workflow look like now?
Mara Selects get signed at export, before anything leaves my machine. Clients get the signed files. I keep the originals. The signing adds maybe two minutes to a delivery, and I stopped noticing it after the first month.
ODDR Do clients care?
Mara Some do, mostly the ones with legal teams. Most do not notice at all, which is fine. It is not there for them. It is there for the argument I hope not to have.
It is there for the argument I hope not to have. That is the honest version of why anyone does this.
ODDR Scraped portfolios have been the loud story this year. Has that touched you?
Mara Constantly, and provenance does not fix it. Signing my work does not stop anyone training on it. What it does is let me say, with something firmer than my word, which images are mine and when they existed. That is narrow, but it is not nothing.
ODDR What would you tell a photographer who thinks this is overhead?
Mara That they are right until the day they are not. Two minutes per delivery against four weeks once. I would take that trade again.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.