Merchants in the temple

June 14, 2007 by pmelcher.

The Cepic congress is a fascinating experience. Attended by hundreds of photo agencies who came from almost all over the world, it is certainly the best place to evaluate the size, and the health of the market. Bluntly contradicting the nay sayers who continue to claim that stock photography, be it RM or RF, is dying of a slow death, it is a clear sign of an incredible health.

On three floors, hundreds upon hundreds of small, mid size and new agencies are bargaining their images to each other,  not unlike kids trading baseball cards.  And while this goes on over the course of three hectic days, there is absolutly no signs of the predominance of the big giants, Getty and Corbis. Retreating to a secondary building, dealing in the secrecy of closed rooms, they seemed completely absent from the gambling arena. Those who say that they are the only players in town clearly have never gone to a Cepic congress.

This market is still very much owned and control by a multitude of small to medium photo agencies either thriving in a niche market, or playing across the whole spectrum with the content of many other same sized company.

Sure, a Getty and a Corbis can snatch up one or two of them a year, but it is quite like stealing an ant or two from an ant farm. The colony survives very well. Furthermore, those who were acquired never seem to leave the business and return the next year with new content, relaunching yet another photo agency.

The only sadness of this congress lies in the lack of photography. Many, many catalogs litter the desks, in between screens that display bored slideshows and from one desk to another, it seems that the same photographs are being peddled as tissue would be showed to a  import export company.

There are no images on the wall, no exhibits, no projections. Although the business of photography is buzzing all about, the images themselves are completely absent. As well as photographers. No one seems to say : “look, we just signed up this great photographer !!!”.  No one seems to be proud of their images, as much as they are proud of their new website design or latest catalog. “My search is the best”, or “I have 5 gazillion images in my database” are the phrases most heard. There is not much love of photography at a Cepic congress. The temple of photography has been taken over by the merchants.

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