The massacre continues…

February 1, 2007 by pmelcher.

Might be little late, but I have not seen it anywhere else. After dumping HFP (Gamma, Rapho, Explorer, Top, Hoa Qui, Keystone, Jacana) to scavenger company Green Recovery, and washing their hands of the whole thing, rumor is that Groupe Lagardere is about to do the same with the whole Hachette Group. But I am not going to speculate on rumors.

No, what is true, is that the Industrial Specialist, “The group’s major investments concern primarily the takeover of companies in difficulty”, has named Stéphane Ledoux et Olivier Bloud, from Cité de l’Image, as the new managers. Who are these people?

Stephane Ledoux created Cite de l’Image, a photography lab, who cites Corbis as one of their clients. As most people know, the French photo business relies very much on prints, as almost every digital file is printed and brought by messenger/account executive to photo editors to be sold. Not much is being done on the Internet yet, mostly because of union laws. Instead of doing their own printing in house with extremely expensive machines, a lot of photo agencies rely on outside labs who can offer a lower cost as they increase volume. In the past, the HFP group used a competing lab Central Color (Oh !, same LOGO*) to have its prints done. Wonder what will happen now?

Olivier Bloud is a successful (?) entrepreneur in the royalty free space, creator of Iconotec (only sells 4 CDs and looks deserted) and manager of WestValley, a software company developing ASP solutions for the Photo Industry and whose only client, up to now, seems to be the content deprived Iconotec. He appears to also be working for Cite De L’image too. Seems to me that this is a takeover by Cite pour L’image, with financial backing from Green Recovery. Anyway, as we now know which labs and web solution the defunct HFP will be using ( what will be the new name, as obviously, they cannot keep Hachette Fillipacchi Photo ? Green Photo ? ), we wonder if all the collection will become Royalty Free. Olivier Bloud seems to have been a commercial stock photographer in the past, so there might be some hope he will understand the business model of Hoa Qui, Jacana, Top, and Explorer.

But what happens to Gamma, who has multiple World Press Awards winners on staff and iconic images in its collections ? And Rapho, who has some of the best photographers in the world (Edouard Boubat, Jean-Philippe Charbonnier, Robert Doisneau, Willy Ronis, Hans Silvester). Under some type of Franco French decision that these image collections are part of the French “patrimoine” (cultural heritage) and therefore should never fall into dirty “foreign” hands, the successive rulers of HFP have poorly juggled incompetency with national pride, dropping financial result in the process. But what the hell, they were, and are, defending culture against corporate greed. Although, I guess, in this case, French corporate greed is better than cross Atlantic barbarians. At least the massacre will be done on French soil, by French people, with French blood. The heritage will remain beyond all, French. ( by the way, on a side note : Hans Silvester is German and I do not hear Hungary screaming for the return of Robert Capa’s images).

And seriously, how does one  successfully run a photo agency these days, while running other time consuming businesses ?
However, I might be wrong and these guys might be able to turn the company around and return to its past glory. I sincerely hope so.

* Central Color is a much older photo lab than Cite de L’Image.

Posted in editorial, photojournalism, france, corbis, getty, Royalty free | Print | No Comments »