July 12, 2010 by pmelcher.

The Long love affair between photography and Media is over .

Because the editorial world is replacing experience photo editors with journalistic background for inexperience pixel pushers that are ordered to select the cheapest images, regardless of quality, they are opening the visual airways for steep competition.

A bit like traditional Royalty free opened the door to microstock by increasing prices and leaving a huge marketplace vacuum, magazines ( web or print) are leaving a wide open space for quality photography.  Because they still thinking terms of gatekeepers, they beleive the audience will follow them into whatever they publish. Problem is, this is the internet : the many to many market. They are no gatekeepers anymore, just influencers.

More and more, out of frustration to see great images go unpublished, photo agencies or photographers are doing their own editing/publishing. Zuma Press, with their Double Truck magazine was one of the first ones. Probably fed up of not seeing great images published in their rightful format, aka double page, they proceeded in doing their own magazine, featuring the images they liked the most. Is it a runaway success ? No. But it was a first.

Since then, a lot of photo agencies have launched their own blogs, featuring their own images, since their traditional clients would not use them. Not because they were bad, but because they were unwilling to pay a decent price for them. Some of these blogs, like X17online.com have become leaders in their markets. Photo agencies like VII have also launched  their own magazine, also in frustration of never seeing some of their great coverage go unpublished.

The result ? The public now has access to other sources of photography, previously hidden from them. They can see and compare. Gatekeepers are being challenged by influencers.

The smart publisher are the ones that will quickly realize and capitalize on this. Drop the most traveled image rat race for the lesser traveled side road of quality.

Here’s the deal : A well designed magazine with high quality- exclusive content will have no problem raising a successful paywall. The same way as people have no problem paying for very expensive Jewelry at Tiffany’s, or Cartier, they have no problem for paying for something they feel has value. They will not never pay for same middle of the road content. It’s not Pay walls that do not work, it’s what it’s what is behind them.

So here is the evolution of photography : More and more, creators of photography , disappointed of not seeing their best work being published, mostly because of unbreakable subscription deals made with mass providers, will start self publishing . More and more, those precious eyeballs that all want to retain so desperately will start navigating elsewhere and spread their attention span to other non mainstream sites.

The tide will be even greater when a critical mass will start understanding that they are not seeing the best , but the cheapest . Photographers will start combining their content with others and create their own outlets. Photo Agencies will gain momentum in their self publishing efforts. The media outlets that have spend millions to raise and maintain their brands will start being eclipsed by a guy and a computer.

Don’t think it can work ? Wireimage has been very succesful for many years in charging consumers to have access to medium  access to their images. No downloads, no editorial, just access to bigger thumbnails. Strangely, that model has never been replicated while their is no reason why it wouldn’t work elsewhere.

Editorial publishers are dropping the ball on their suppliers and forcing them to become their own competition. Or go out of business. Does that make any sense ? All that while lying to their clients. How long will that last ? Even with the advent of Ipads and E readers, this will not continue long.

Maybe the fall of Newsweek, and right behind, Time magazine, has a lot to do with that. If you have paid attention, you would have seen that in the last 4-5 years, they have reduced their image content to everything Getty/AP/Reuters in order to save money. Result ? Same images you all have seen on the web, but a week later…And then they wonder why people don’t purchase them anymore. They have laid off so many great photo editors that there is no way they can even find a great image anymore. In other words, they have both killed what had made them successful.

In other words, if photography is in crisis right now, its because Media is dying of a long slow agonizing death and trying the bring it along. Trouble is, photography can live without Media, not the opposite. These times are about to show it.

Posted in celebrity, magazine, Newsweek, E Reader, license, TIME, news, editorial, photojournalism, web 2.0, getty | Print | No Comments »

March 2, 2010 by pmelcher.

How to iTablet the Ipad ? Microsoft is about to reveal something that could bypass the need to carry yet another big thing just to read magazine, newspapers or surf websites. Called the “Mobile Surface” and only to be shown to employees for now (must be extra beta), it is a small portable box that will project an interactive image on any surface.

Look :

 Of course, there is a lot of questions left. Mainly, will it not crash. However, this technology could be integrated in your cellphone ( the smart kind) and, while keeping the size small, allow for higher viewing real estate.  One will have to see how editing an image on a blue table will work out, or keeping your email private in an airplane.

This is however a very interesting development for E-publishing  ( just think of a 3D video or immersive photography) as well as computing in general. More stuff here

Posted in technology, lens, Newsweek, E Reader, magazine, multimedia, slideshow, photojournalism, web 2.0, newspaper, editorial | Print | 1 Comment »

January 19, 2010 by pmelcher.

So you would think that with all the problems that online publications are causing to the print magazine industry, they would fight back in some manner. The print paper world would be all gang ho in trying to secure its predominance as the primary source of news and information so that the crowds would rush to purchase copies. But no.

It’s a complete lethargy. Well, at least in the USA. Take editorial photography. As much as they care if an image has been used in a competing publication, they completely ignore anything online.  They seem to be completely oblivious to the fact that they come out sometimes with the same image that has been seen previously for more than a week on numerous websites. As if no one paid attention. However, with some URL’s drawing millions of visitors , and most, the same people they also try to attract, it should be hard to ignore.

Yet, they continue to ignore the reasons for their decline. Partly to save money ( as if it is going to help) , partly because a completely blindness to the forces that are shaping their market. If I have seen an image numerous times, for free, online, I am going to be a bit upset if I see it, again, days, weeks later, in a print publication I had to pay for. If it happens once, I could ignore it. If it happens issue after issues, I would want my money back.

No other industry has this approach to its consumer. Movies only show trailers, music have just snippets ( of  course, I am not mentioning stolen material) and you pay to hear/see the full version. If all was available online  a week before they could be purchased, it is doubtful that a lot of people would pay for them.

Magazines, in some sort of oblivious superiority,  continue to publish , week after weeks, month after months the same images already seen online more than once. Maybe they think that if they ignore it, the problem might disappear. Maybe they think that by the time they come out, readers will have forgotten what they had seen just hours ago on a website. Maybe they just think that their support is so superior than the digital, no one will notice.

The second issue with this, a bit more hidden, is that photogrpahers and photo agencies provide website with a free first right  at a lesser fee than  what a print publication would pay. In other words, website get to use the same image, much sooner than print for 10% of the price that a magazine pays to use it a week later. Does it make any sense ?

In France, for example, no magazine would ever publish an image that has been used on a website previously. None. Photo agencies or photographers do not have a problem with that since website pay so little, it is not even funny. Thus, readers can be sure that will discover new image in every issue. And with just cause, they paid for that, and other privilege. They paid to purchase a  product that do not consider them like fools. They pay for originality. They pay for what they value.

In the upcoming or ongoing debate about online pay walls, how many of the newspapers, magazines and others will take the step to guarantee original photography ? Because if it is to see another slideshow made of pictures from the trilogy (Getty, AP, Reuters ) that you can see anywhere else, I doubt people will be happy. And if they are not happy, well, they won’t pay. A pay wall will only work if people want to get in. And people will want to get in if the content inside is not something seen elsewhere for free.

The war between original content ( expensive) and  cost cutting  (cheap) is raging with  cost-cutting seemingly winning most battles these days. However, creating something for cheap that no one wants to pay for is not at all a guarantee of success. Once the CFO’s and their bosses finish destroying the very nature of what made their companies successful in a rarely seen slaughterhouse of talent, there will be only a few standing. And those will not be the ones that are the cheapest to operate but those who have found the zen like balance between originality, quality, cost and timeliness.

Photography will always be here to offer  all of this and much, much more. We know it, we are just waiting for them to understand it.

Posted in license, newspaper, celebrity, magazine, Newsweek, TIME, photojournalism, editorial, transaction, finance, wire service, france | Print | No Comments »

December 24, 2009 by pmelcher.

Today should be a day to rejoice, worldwide. People all over the world close their doors, and eyes, from the surrounding world and regroup in their family cocoon to enjoy a few hours of peace and serenity. Outside, the battles still rages creating more casualties.

French newspaper le Monde just announced that collective photo agency, L’oeil Public, was filing for bankruptcy.  For those who only care about what is happening in their own country, or even backward, that might mean nothing. However, like a upcoming storm, events that will soon be over your head tend to start somewhere else. L’oeil Public was one of the most successful collective in the past ten years. Composed of a handful of very talented photogrpahers, they had managed to elevate social photojournalism to new heights. Mostly specialized in french social events, they were not afraid to tackle international events if they deemed important enough L’oeil was one of the rare few collective to have managed to cross the Atlantic successfully , getting regular assignment from US publication like Time or Newsweek.

A collective is not a photo agency. A collective is made up of like minded photographers who decide to pool some of their resource needs in order to reduce cost and help each other. It is a tad socialist concept, thus very unpopular in the USA as it might potentially lead to a communist revolution .

The reason for L’oeil’s closure is now becoming a banality : Falling prices and  lesser assignments. A declining demand for original photography thanks to a marketplace that is more eager to save money than make money. A marketplace that has become a playground for CFO’s and their armies of blindly dedicated bean counters. Where photojournalism has been replaced by coupon journalism, where photo editors recruit amateurs to submit free images and where photographer hold high and proud checks with $2 and $3 license sales while screaming ” This is Better than nothing”. It is a market place where pundits will tell you that the road to posterity is paved with Twitts, blogs and Facebook updates. That the next Google search could yield thousands if not millions of dollars and that SEO is your key to success, not photography. It is a marketplace where trade publications turn a blind eye to monopolistic behaviors and where cheap has replace talent. It is a marketplace  that now sees editorial sales fall to 8 and 11 cents a piece.

L’Oeil Public’s situation is certainly not  a fluke and should not be dismissed as extremely far and extremely irrelevant. It is what is awaiting a lot of businesses and individuals in the year to come. Prosperity in not just around the corner and the “something is better than nothing” mentality will not work.

Posted in TIME, license, magazine, Newsweek, photojournalism, finance, news, france, editorial, getty | Print | No Comments »

December 18, 2009 by pmelcher.

All the E-readers and tablets are fine and exciting as long as they offer something new. If magazine publishers are going to do the same mistakes as they have been doing online, that is copy and paste the print content on a digital format, then let’s forget them.

Who will want to carry an extra item if its only a digital copy of what they can get on print. The other day, Time Inc released a video of what Sports Illustrated might look on a color E-reader. Besides giving updated sports results and bigger slideshows, the rest was exactly the same. Page of text, with same layout as print, with a few lonely photographs to illustrate them. Sorry, but there was nothing exciting about that.( Bonnier released  another example of a boring Print to E Reader layout in this this video. When you are done yawing, please continue). If the format is reinvented then the layout should be too. What we need is a Alexey Brodovitch of the E reader, a revolutionary mind that will break the old tired rules of publishing and make reading magazine exciting again. Someone that will invent the continuous magazine for example, breaking away from the daily, weekly, monthly, bi monthly cycle that printing and circulation demanded. Someone that will take advantage of the new possibilities, the new format for all that it has. Simply applying cheap make-up on a dead format will not work. People are not going to purchase and use these electronic tablets just to save the environment. The salvation of the magazine is  all in the content, not the support.

Take for example photography ( mmm, wonder why ?). Up to now, publishing empires of America have used photogrpahy only as a tool to prove or confirm a point , not as a narrative. Take news magazine like Time or Newsweek. They will use photography to illustrate an article on a topic, just to confirm with a visual what is being written about in the text. Why ? because as humans, we tend to trust more what we see than what we read. The written text has authority while the visual has credibility. In the current print media, the text is always, always privileged over the visual, even if sometimes the images would be a much better tool of communication. The image is used as a punctuation point after a series of written facts and explanations.

Part of the reason for this lies in the print limitation. Photographs have a lot of color and that used to be more expensive. Also, they can take more space and print is limited in the number of pages it can offer. Finally, they are much more difficult to lay out than plain black and whit columns of text.

But E readers and Tablets have none of these limitations. They are free of all the rules and regulation that had dictated the behavior of their print brothers. They are free of space , time and cost limitations. They no longer have to be the punctuation points of their text sibling. They can now freely and openly become masters of the information, leaving a simple caption the role of punctuating their reality.

The current batch of e magazines are a boring crop of conference room challenged idea spit out by a committee of politically frighten mid managers. They come out of the mind of those who want to save their jobs rather than create new idea. Where are the great Art Directors of tomorrow? Those that will reinvent the layout and the magazine at the same time. We have the tools, what we need now are the creatives.

Same goes for photographers. It will be those that stop thinking about photography as a punctuation mark, as a one image narrative, as a quarter space or double page , those who reinvent the narrative that will pierce through the frozen grounds of the current creative tundra .

Let’s kill the punctuation mark.

Posted in magazine, Newsweek, E Reader, multimedia, newspaper, finance, photojournalism, web 2.0, news | Print | No Comments »

October 7, 2009 by pmelcher.

20 minutes to better understand what my earlier post was about. Chimamanda Adichietalks about literature but photography is as much a guilty member of this . We should no longer be the instruments of intellectual colonization.

Next time you embark on a photo shoot, think of where your story will fit in the perception of the country, continent and culture you are about to photograph.

Posted in newspaper, magazine, technology, Newsweek, TIME, photojournalism, editorial, slideshow, filter, news | Print | 2 Comments »

August 19, 2009 by pmelcher.

Some photo editors need a medal…along with their editor in chief. Not a one time award for best editing. No. Something bigger, brighter and more reflective of their achievement.  Jody Quon, Director of Photography for the wonderful New York Magazine should be the first recipient. Not only the photography in every issue is always amazing, refreshing, surprising and captivating, but the Fashion Issue that just hit the stands this week surpasses everything. The portraits are dead on, the stock is carefully chosen, but the real treat is a 24 pages photo essay by Marcus Bleasdale on the fall fashion shows in Paris.

Yes, 24 pages, mostly double page spread, of pure, unaltered, hardly captioned photography. No article, no explanation, just pure photography. This is such a rare and powerful event in magazine publishing, it should be noted screamed about. When all other magazines, worldwide, are using less and less photography, in what they beleive is a healthy way to cut costs, New York Magazine goes entirely the other way and puts more.

It is not the first time a magazine hires a war/documentary photographer to shoot fashion. It has been done before, hoping to shed a different vision on the already over-photographed catwalks. Most of the time, the result is very bad. The reason : The photographers couldn’t care less about what they are seeing and you can see it. They would much prefer to be paid to go back on the battlefield, any battlefield.

Marcus Bleasdale, recent new member of  VII  photo agency and mostly known for his powerful and multiple award winning work on the horrible conditions of gold mining in Congo, was up to now, mostly seen in Time or Newsweek magazine, if hardly at all. He would take his work and expose it everywhere it could make a difference (See article here). If you know the man, he is not the type you will see at parties, movie premieres and or at fashion shows. That is a world that he avoids at  all cost.

Liu Wen at the Alexander McQueen show. (Photo: Marcus Bleasdale)

So, seeing his photographs of runways and backstage is a shock. I had to read his credit three or four times before I could convince myself that this was the same man who has been living in mud, contracting the worse horrible diseases, hiding from corporate-hired hit man, in order to expose the realities of Africa.

The New York Magazine spread is Marcus all right: It is clearly judgmental, sometimes violent in its opinion. Some models look like criminals just arrested for a crime they know they are guilty off and the whole atmosphere reeks of decadence. Like a party that has been going on too long. You see and feel that Marcus doesn’t like this crowd. There is also a strong sense of solitude, probably wanted by Marcus but accentuated by the editing of Jody.

So, for all those who complain and whine about the death of the photo essay in the American magazine landscape, go out and purchase one, or ten copies of this week’s New York Magazine. Not only you will love it, but you will also send a clear signal that this is what we all want to see more off. Furthermore, the images do not seem to be online, so if you want to experience them, you better get off that couch.

Thank you Marcus Bleasdale, Thank you Jody Quon, Thank  you Adam Moss ( That is the Editor in Chief, in case you didn’t know)

Posted in technology, lens, Newsweek, magazine, TIME, editorial, photojournalism, news | Print | 1 Comment »

August 18, 2009 by pmelcher.

Some photo agencies want to play with the big boys with no understanding of the fundamentals of business. Take Miami based photo agency PR photos. Right on the heals of the Getty Images announcement that they would charge $5 per image for cell phone usage on images of a certain very low size, that “agency in the sun” decided to replicate:

Unlike Getty, PRphoto doesn’t have staff photographers. According to their photographer’s five years contract, its a 50% share. Thus, each photographer gets $2.50 per image sold. Ouch! The photographer also has the obligation to submit images regularly , edit them, caption them, allow the agency to crop them, use them for promotional use for 10 years, and not complain if they loose anything.(welcome back, slavery !!).

How cool is that ?

Wait, it gets better. They also have a subscription plan:

Yes, you read it right. It starts at $1 an image and goes as low as pennies ( $1000 a month / unlimited downloads). And people are worried about Microstock ? what about Megamadness? Who let these people out ?

The funny part of all this is that, besides them, everyone knows this model will fail. It would take a huge critical mass of regular clients to make this viable. Huge. And with the type of content  they offer, in celebrity, news and sport, they will never achieve it.

Hopefully everyone involve in this company has a side job to sustain them and this is just a hobby. Or a bad dream. or both. Why would any photographer submit themselves to such a treatment is beyond any understanding.

You can browse and see more of the work of PR Photos here:

Posted in celebrity, magazine, Newsweek, keyword, transaction, getty, editorial, Microstock | Print | No Comments »

June 18, 2009 by pmelcher.

It is interesting to see that as the technology has made easier and faster to transmit images, we are seeing less of photojournalism on main events.

30 years ago, it would have been unimaginable that such events like the Gaza/Israeli war, the Sri Lanka war or the Iranian protest would not be photographed. Now it seems to be the rule more than the exception. More and more, governments seem succesful in blocking any professional coverage of events they deem to cast a negative light on their policy.

The US, with the first and second Iraqi war were the first to initiate a partial blockade of imagery. They subtly enforced a control of photographers by forcing them to be either pooled ( first Iraqi war) or embedded ( second Iraqi war). It has been quite succesful in avoid the American public and the world to see the real impact of these wars.

Israel was even more succesful in completely shielding its theater of operations from any media. Sri-Lanka followed suit and now Iran.

It doesn’t seem so hard, after all. As long as you threaten the media with  physical harm or arrest, you are practically done.

Thus, the only scarce images we get to see are those official images, or those taken by participants, both with very clear agendas.

The reasons for this major shift in coverage are numerous :

- Lack of financing from the media. Either they cannot afford to send photographers to these part of the world, or they will not pay enough to justify a free lancer to risk their life. The disappearance of media outlets does not help as a photographer can’t even count on volume sales to cover his costs.

- The new journalists : they much prefer to set up Google alerts, check Twitter, Facebook and other sites than lift their asses from their chairs and report themselves. Twitter success, for example, is not due to its users, but to how broadly the media is using it. You have more chance to be published these days if you have a Twitter account than if you send a video to CNN Ireport. And why would those journalist leave the comfort of their cubicle if everything is delivered in their desktop.

- The death of the photo reporter : few and rare are those who really care about covering the news at all cost. Gone are the days of the Capa, Mccullin,  Adams, and many, many others that could not live if an event was not covered properly. Today’s photographers are too busy courting the NGO’s and Foundations to pay for them to cover anything.

- The death of photo agencies : the Sygma’s, SIPA, Gamma of the not so old days would do whatever it took to support a photographer willing to go and cover an event. Since you can now make a hundred time more money with a picture of Lindsay Lohan leaving her hotel a few blocks away, why bother ?

- The disappearance of the great news magazine: Besides Europe, great news magazines have vanished. They have not been replaced by online equivalent. There is a huge void. Not because there is no audience, but because there is no great editor in chief, great news gatherers.

It’s appalling to see, at least in the USA, that just because  foreign journalists are being kicked out from Iran, the pro coverage stops. It will only get worst.

Update : an exception should be made for Polaris Images. see here

Posted in magazine, technology, Newsweek, newspaper, SIPA, editorial, photojournalism, TIME, news | Print | No Comments »

April 3, 2009 by pmelcher.

While the world of photography was busy trying to figure out how to squeeze one more dollar out of every image, pointing the fingers at potential scammers, or listing, day after, the name and addresses of every single newspaper closing its door, the hallways of the supreme court justice in Manhattan echoed of the fainted footsteps of a mostly forgotten, yet highly important case.

A very well to do photo agency, back in the days when it was still trying to make a dent in the news editorial market had reached out to a very talented photographer based in the nation’s capital, Washington DC. Having lost its main contributor in the White House, it  called for the service of an already well implemented and well establish photographer to cover the ins and outs of the political establishment. The photographer, already the recipient of many many assignments from top news publication like Time, Newsweek, Us World and many more, thought, at the time, “hey , why not”.For him, it was an opportunity to grow his reach worldwide, or so he thought.

In these days, film was still mainly used , and so he submitted many of his archives, and his recent work, in slide and film format. The well to do agency had a battery of photo editors looking at the material and selecting the ones to be scanned to be added to its online delivery system.

Time went by, and after 16 months, not seeing any tangible results , the photographer decided to terminate the relationship. Up to now, nothing special.

But upon termination, he was incapable of getting all his images back. Not a few, but more than 12,000 of them. Gone, vanished, disappeared. At first, the well to do agency denied any wrongdoing or hugely minimized the count. That didn’t work too well. They were found guilty for the whole amount.

Lets take a pause here. 12,000 slides, or negatives, that is a lot. out of 50,000 submitted. Its not one slide that fell  behind the back of the lightbox. Its 12,000 of them. well 12,640 exactly.

Out of all the images submitted, only 763 were scanned to be put on the website and thus attempted to be sold. Less than 1%. Either the photographer was really, really  bad, or the editors were really, really lazy. Or, very simply, the big wealthy company was so overwhelmed with images to scan from everywhere that they just couldn’t do more.

My take is on the last option.

Anyway, guilty of lost of images, the Photo Agency and the photographer went on to quantify the lost. How much ?

That is always an ongoing issue, isn’t it ? How to quantify the value of an image if it has never been sold and cannot even be seen by anyone anymore? Some of these images could have been  masterpieces or just  plain film in a mount.

Of course, the Big Photo Agency took the low approach. In a nutshell, backed by “experts”, they figured out how much money they made with the photographers work over 16 months and added some . After 2 years of testimony, a Judge declared that $100,000 was a fair compensation. A mere  $7.26 per roll of 36 frames  !!! including processing.  If you can make a deal like that, its worth dropping digital and going back to shooting film.

Obviously, the photographer was in shock. Never in the history of lost film was an award been so low.  Here is one of the issue : Because the amount of images lost is so high, a more regular award of lets say, $400 per image ( still low) would quickly bring the total to Millions of dollars. Usually people loose a few images. or a few hundred. but not 12, 000 !!!

So, the judge was trying to make an overall acceptable amount instead of looking at the details. For the photographer, the lost of income is almost incalculable. It’s blood ( hopefully, not to much), sweat ( a lot) and tears ( especially after hearing the judgment). An appeal has been made, obviously.

The big bad unprofitable photo agency has a battery of full time lawyers that have nothing else to do then to drag this forever. The photographer, well, not really. This has been going on for 7 years now with more than 10,000 documents and a battery of witnesses. And it ’s not over.

Why is this important ? Because, like any judgment, this will become a judicial reference. If the Agency gets away by paying  $7.36 for 36 frames, then subsequently, all lost images in the future will be awarded accordingly. And that affects every single photographer out there. Like any other trade profession, ones work should be respected to its real value. Not just for the cost of the support it lays upon.

What is even more upsetting here is that this appeal went on completely silently in the industry. Instead, everyone is busy looking at their navels, making sure their backyards is clean. This should be everywhere, talked about in all trade association and debated publicly. There is no predefined amount, obviously, and determining it is very difficult. But since it will affect everyone, it should be everyone responsibility to join the debate.

Posted in newspaper, license, copyright, Newsweek, TIME, photojournalism, news, law, transaction, finance, corbis | Print | 3 Comments »