A zombie is born

March 31, 2009 by pmelcher.

There is confusion in the heartland of photography…and a lot of budgeting. Today, after a few months of waiting, the legendary LIFE magazine relaunched as a website. Great idea !!. I , personally, could not wait.

How great was my deception. Besides the great images of the past, all new images are just Getty and Wireimage. Like its older siblings, The Big Picture, Pixecetera, the Wall Street Photo journal, and many others, Life.com photo editors are obviously limited to whom they partnered with. And if you know this profession a little bit, you know that it is not because they offer the best images, but rather the cheapest deal.

Thus these galleries of so called “best of..” are just galleries of the “best of the cheapest images”.  Pathetic. No effort, no budget is even put into trying to be original, different and compelling. These so called photo editors are just wire service editors that pick and choose out of a pre fed stream of selected images.

The result : The same images everywhere, the same perspective, no originality. What ever happened to photo editors that research  hard and long to find that quintessential image, at whatever the cost in time or money ? The result mattered.

This is not Life magazine, this is a Getty/Wireimage feed. This site is just a facade to license images from the Getty site. Each image has a “license ” button that leads you back to the Getty site. Who needs to see these images again ? Seems to me that this new low life version of Life is just going to make more people flock to Flickr.com or similar where then can really see original photography.

It’s sad. It is very sad because it is another missed opportunity.  RIP Life. Again

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