October 5, 2007 by pmelcher.

 Alexandra Boulat passed away last night.

It is a terrible thing to loose a great photojournalist. No only the world looses an out of the ordinary human being, but we also all loose a witness to our time. Born in a family of photo people, Annie , founder and director of the Cosmos agency in France and Pierre Boulat, also an extremely talented photographers, Alexandra did not fear being judged by both her parents. She did what few could have done.

We probably met when we were both kids, in between a Magnum Cocktail or behind our parents at some photo opening. Who knows ? I certainly do not remember. What I do know is that I have followed her photo career as a spectator of greatness and like many others, learned about the world, our world, my world through her eyes. Her images told me about places and events that I could have never, ever experienced without her passion to report. She had the eye of a reporter, of a witness but also of a writer that not only had something to say but also refused to remain quiet. It seemed that she could never use anything bigger than a 35 mm lens as she not only wanted to be as close as possible from her story, but also wanted to show us that everything around her subjects was as important as the subject itself.

I never met Alexandra, probably because part of me thought it would happen one day. I was wrong and I regret it now. If only to simply have had the chance to tell her how much I loved her work. However, it still feels to me that I lost a great friend, someone I could always count on. The pages of the magazines will feel quite empty without her images.

Some of her work can be seen on the VII Photo agency website that she co-founded.

My thoughts go to Alexandra’s proud mother Annie and her family.

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October 5, 2007 by pmelcher.

In an interview to PDN magazine, master blogger Dan Heller offers the photography world a new idea : Create an Ebay of photography. People, that is everybody and anybody, would upload images to a site where image buyers, other people, would purchase them for an settle upon price. That would allow for the overhaul market to grow from the estimated market of $2 billion to what he estimates to be $15 billion.

A couple of thoughts come to mind here. First, there are already platforms that offer this service, like Drr or Photoshelter. For a monthly fee, these sites allow anyone to upload their images to be purchased on line. One, Drr, handles the transaction for you, the other Photoshelter, lets you handle the transaction. Both take a small percentage on any succesful agreement and allow to license either RF and RM. Both, albeit still new on the market, do not seem to have exploded into an e bay size platform. At least not yet.

There is also Flickr, whose founder just decided to go on paternity leave ( good for him) after announcing at the start of 2007 that his platform would enable users to license their images . Something we have yet to see happen. In its shadow, there is the crash prone, geotagging happy Zooomr, who also announced with big fanfare, that it would revolutionarise the stock photo industry by empowering its users to price their images. It has yet to be launched. It seems its CEO is more busy photowalking around the West coast than really concerned about making it happen.

Finally, there are the Scoopt, Spymedia and other citizen journalists dumb dumb platform that are waiting to exhale.

If an Ebay of photography is a good idea, than why not create an Ebay of drawings or music. After all, anyone can draw or paint and anyone can compose music ? Or an Ebay for idea: Buy and sell any idea.

and why didn’t EBay think of that already ?

Photography is not a second hand Mario’s Brother video game and will never be. It cannot be sold like one. It still is, in my book, an artform, done by professionals for a very good reason. It needs talent. It is not because it is easy to create that it is as easy to sell. I can draw but I am not a Picasso. This reasoning has to stop as it is insulting for the thousands of pro photographers that either risk their lives to show us remote conflicts to those who can generate millions of dollars in revenue without ever slashing their prices. An E bay of photography would somewhat look like a result from Google images, a useless junkyard on uninteresting images. It would also be, like Flickr, a magnet for copyright infringement. And finally, it would not serve much purpose as most photography is extremely timely and tends to be obsolete very quickly.

I would love to see someone break its teeth on such a project so that maybe, just by living proof, the those San Fransisco based web 2.0 twitter happy pseudo entrepreneurs would move on to other spheres of quick money making scams.

NO SENSE ALERT:

I read this article twice and have yet to understand what it has to do with photography.

Posted in yahoo, No sense, Search, google, web 2.0, transaction, flickr, prosumer, editorial | Print | No Comments »