August 4, 2010 by pmelcher.

From a Photo Editor job posting at Time, inc, the world’s biggest publisher of magazine in the world:

-Excellent editorial judgment and eye, must generate story ideas and identify topics to cover, must react to news.
-Edit and build various online photo galleries, notably never-seen LIFE archival content and LIFE.coms weekly feature: The Weeks Best Photos
-Oversee and perform the digital restoration of LIFE archival photos (basic retouching and color correction)
-Experience negotiating and managing usage rights and rates for digital, mobile and video content
-Assign, produce and direct original photo essays
-Liaise with Editorial, Legal, Sales and PR Teams in the execution of featured content packages
-Manage freelance staff
-Strong eye for young talent
- Must be creative in terms of doing more with less for less and must be ready and willing to do so

Revealing, isn’t it ? Especially the last phrase, which could be rewritten like this : Must be capable of getting the best images for peanuts and not complain about it. Ever.

This is symptomatic of the photo world today : Publishing companies profiting from the recession to squeeze top talent into a dilapidated photo department and forcing them to put pressure on photographers.

When will we see photo editors salaries only constituted of the money they save ?

Here is you budget. Whatever you do not use for photo purchase, you can keep for yourself.

Thus putting photo editor in direct survival competition with photographers.

As long as the publishing companies keep on treating photography as a necessary evil that needs to be crushed into “misc.” category along with other parasite expenses, nothing will change.

And, as long as there is photographers or photo agencies willing to accept this pathetic treatment , nothing will change.

O yes, if you wondered why we all had to sacrifice ourselves: 

Time Inc. Operating Profit Jumps 50%, Ad Revenue Climbs 4%

Posted in celebrity, license, magazine, Good Enough, Corpocrates, newspaper, SIPA, news, editorial, photojournalism, TIME, getty | Print | No Comments »

April 26, 2010 by pmelcher.

Details are still sketchy as the official announcement will be made at 5 PM ( UK time) but according to sources, the London staff has just be informed of the purchase. They might be waiting to inform the Berliner staff, located in Los Angeles, bought by Rex Features a few years back. This acquisition makes sense.

After many years of trying alone,  Getty Images has never succeeded in taking the number one place from Old timer Rex Features. They desperately tried. Thus, in a true and tried fashion, if Getty cannot beat, Getty purchases.

This is going to rock the photo agency world in many levels and in a lot of countries outside the UK. Rex Features does not own much content and has mostly been a distributor of various content. One thinks primarily of SIPA, which has been a key associate of Rex since its beginning.  Will SIPA continue to get Rex’s material for France ? Will Rex Getty still distribute them in the UK ? And what about the little celebrity agency Berliner in LA? Does Getty need another celebrity agency on top of Filmmagic, Wireimage, Buzzfoto , AFP and their own ?

Maybe the 5PM relase will give us more info. But then, probably not.

*******************

PRESS RELEASE “Celebrity and entertainment content is a growing and vital part of the editorial imagery industry and this acquisition positions us to meet and exceed the demand for nearly instantaneous material,” said Jonathan Klein, co-founder and CEO of Getty Images. “Growing our entertainment imagery business continues to be a key strategic focus. The real winners will be our customers, who can now expect to see greater choice and more easily accessible imagery.”

Getty Images intends to maintain Rex Features’ brand and with the combined resources of Getty Images and Rex Features, Getty Images will continue to generate new imagery for their respective celebrity and entertainment collections. Additionally, Getty Images’ global distribution channels will increase international customers’ access to Rex Features’ products and services.

The acquisition of Rex Features was driven by the continually evolving celebrity imagery business and gives Getty Images more coverage capabilities for events and portraiture and will expand the entertainment and celebrity imagery segment.

“Over more than five decades, Rex Features has built a strong heritage and reputation that Getty Images will build upon to the benefit of customers worldwide,” added Klein. “Getty Images has always been dedicated to making strategic investments that will provide long-term value to our customers.

Posted in SIPA, celebrity, magazine, transaction, editorial, news, france, getty | Print | 6 Comments »

July 22, 2009 by pmelcher.

When an  amateur astrologist discovers an impact on the planet Jupiter, no one screams the end of professional astrologists, so why is it that when an amateur gets an image that pros did not get, it is the end of professional photojournalism ?

The Universe is huge and not even the sum of all professionally managed telescope can monitor it entirely. The Earth is certainly not that big but it is still a big place and certainly cannot be monitored by the sum of all pro photographers. So yes, and this is no newsflash, amateurs have, and will always get pictures that pros don’t have.

So why the big deal ? Well, here and there, companies spur out, claiming loud and far, that they can help any amateur make a fortune by bypassing all the traditional photo agencies, because, after all, they are all crooks.

These “new” companies claim they are the only option for amateur to sell their news pictures. They try to position themselves as the crowd sourcing photo journalism. The thing is, if anyone has a great news image, and hands it over  to any of the top  news agencies, they will make great money and be published everywhere. Reuters, AP, Getty, Polaris, Sipa and so on will gladly accept a great news picture from anyone, as long as its relevant and truthful.

Furthermore, these new citizen journalist companies, also use traditional editorial photo agencies. Mostly because they have no client base of their own. So all they do is become brokers between the amateur photographer and the established photo agency .

Their business model is the same as microstock and well explained in the long tail theory : make money with the sum of the multitude and not the single bestseller. These “best sellers” are just “call items ” creating an initial appeal, allowing the company to widen its client base.

Green and misinformed pro-journalists seem to get really confused by all this and like a fly is attracted by bright lights,  get their little wings burned in the process. That is normal. Like a lot of other pros journalist, they got their degree in a school, not in the streets. The world they monitor is whatever appears on their company screens : If it is indexed by Google, then it must be real.

Pro and amateur photojournalism are not opposites . Its like saying there is a difference between women and men photo journalist. News does not care who took the picture, nor does the publication that wishes to use them. They are complementary, like amateur astrologists are extremely useful to the whole astrology community. Sure they will be a little annoyed that they didn’t get the picture, but that is mostly because they weren’t physically there.

So, please, lets stop getting excited every time an amateur gets an image published on the cover of the NY Times and proclaiming the end of pro photo journalism. It will happen, over and over again, like the sun rising every morning. Amateur photography brokers will continue to appear on a regular basis, playing on the general public ignorance’s of the market of photography and its real players. No big deal.

Posted in license, Search, Jupiter, magazine, technology, SIPA, google, editorial, news, transaction, wire service, photojournalism, getty | Print | No Comments »

July 7, 2009 by pmelcher.

There is a lot of talk these days that photography has become a commodity.

According to Wikipedia, “A commodity is something for which there is demand, but which is supplied without qualitative differentiation across a market. It is a product that is the same no matter who produces it, such as petroleum, notebook paper, or milk. In other words, copper is copper. The price of copper is universal, and fluctuates daily based on global supply and demand. Stereos, on the other hand, have many levels of quality. And, the better a stereo is [perceived to be], the more it will cost.”

Doesn’t seem the same, does it? Photography, most of the time, is not  “supplied without qualitative differentiation across a market”. Each and every photographer tries hard to have quality in  his images in order to create a qualitative differentiation.

Nor is it “a product that is the same no matter who produces it”. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t not reproduce anyone’s work, if only because the moment has past forever.

However, these are not the only characteristic of a commodity. Wikipedia goes on by saying :

“One of the characteristics of a commodity good is that its price is determined as a function of its market as a whole. Well-established physical commodities have actively traded spot and derivative markets. Generally, these are basic resources and agricultural products such as iron ore, crude oil, coal, ethanol, salt, sugar, coffee beans, soybeans, aluminum, rice, wheat, gold and silver.”

Is photography priced as a function of the market as a whole ? Well, this is where the lines get blurry. Because of subscription models, like the one offered by Getty Images, the perception is certainly that it is. With all images priced not according to its individual value but rather as a part of a whole as well as the fact that it doesn’t not fluctuate neither by content nor volume, it is certainly treated as a commodity. Bundling images from different photographers and pricing them as a service certainly does make photography appear as a interchangeable commodity.

Not that it has have an active trading spot, for now, like crude oil or corn currently has, it certainly going in that direction. From Newscom, to Pixpalace, followed by Gumgum or Picapp, there are more and more places trying to become the De Facto central trading points, like a giant photography trade market.

another blurring point worth of attention is, as described by the same wikipedia:

“Commoditization occurs as a goods or services market loses differentiation across its supply base, often by the diffusion of the intellectual capital necessary to acquire or produce it efficiently. As such, goods that formerly carried premium margins for market participants have become commodities, such as generic pharmaceuticals and silicon chips.”

This is what we have already seen in the RF market where the incessant proliferation and inter-redistribution of brands have made them indistinguishable from one another and completely lose any differentiation. RF has become generic, opening the door to microstock, the epiphany of generic photography.

As we can see, it is not the photography that has become a commodity, but the way it is marketed. The real culprits here are the photo agencies that do not differentiate between their photographers and price there offerings as if it was a commodity. The real culprit of photography’s prices taking a hit is not the buyers market but the sellers who have come to beleive that they are selling commodities, when, in reality, they are not. They have successfully dissociated value from pricing and are even convincing buyers that the real value of their offering is in the service of supplying photography, rather than selling amazing photographs.

Thus, for a photographer, the choice is clear. If an agency offers subscriptions, or talks about photography as a commodity, than it is not your friend . It is just trying to add you to a flow of image and bundle your work in a prepackaged deal.

The same is true for image buyers who have nothing but benefits to accept a subscription or bundle deal. There will be diamonds in the constant flow of rocks and there will priced as rocks.

A image seller that dissociates the value and the price of a photograph is actually serving this self-fulfilling prophecy:

Photography will become a commodity if you want it to be.

Posted in celebrity, license, magazine, Pacific coast news, commercial stock, SIPA, prosumer, getty, editorial, transaction, finance, Microstock | Print | 1 Comment »

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 »

June 10, 2009 by pmelcher.

It seems that these days, it is getting more important to be published than getting the appropriate compensation.  More and more we hear about obscene prices being applied to licensing rights.

Fueled by the idea that photography is a commodity and thus should be priced accordingly, photo agencies worldwide are accepting rates that would make Wal Mart blush in shame. Twice this past week, I have heard about big traffic websites ( in the millions of unique visitors) paying a pathetic $5 per image. And this without any guarantee of  quantity used . After, lets say, 50% paid back to the photographer, the $2.50 left will not even cover for the printing, postage and processing of the invoice !!!

Even companies selling commodities do sell them for a profit.  Some photo agencies are confused between low price point/ high volume and non-for-profit.

Between Getty Images selling all you can eat monthly/yearly subscription package that, at least, guarantees them a minimum revenue and microstock pricing, it is easy to be confused. Add to this a complete misunderstanding of the “Long Tail” theory and you have lots and lots of lost souls. Finally, please remember that the extreme majority of photo agencies managers never made in, or out, of a business school. Seems their feet handle most of their pricing negotiation.

There is something else strongly in play here : it’s what I would call the “air travelers syndrome”.  Someone taking a plane to anywhere these days is ready to accept almost any kind of situation as long as they get to destination. Hour delays, no food, poor service, cramp seating, nasty personnel, heavy security line, dirty planes, and so on. It is almost like holding your breath until you get out of the bad smell area. We deal with it because we really want to get to our destination. Possibly alive.

Photography pricing seems to be the same these days. As long as an image gets publish, we are ready to accept anything. Poor pricing, no quantity guarantees whatsoever, mistreatment , as long as the image gets to the “other side”.

Like air travel, we are happy and proud if we make it and the other passenger that was in line didn’t. Some sense of achievement and success. Some photo agencies will accept a bad deal just to close the door to the next one and be able to smile and wave from the window ” “Look, I am on board and not you, sucker !!”.

Not really a savvy business decision.

Bottom line: Having your images published at whatever cost is not a guarantee of success, as much as flying under any condition will guarantee you will get there. Both are very dangerous and can cause death. With the print world disappearing very fast, on-line sales will soon become the primary market. And with those prices, no one will make it to the other side.

Posted in license, celebrity, magazine, commercial stock, newspaper, SIPA, editorial, transaction, finance, getty | Print | No Comments »

January 1, 2009 by pmelcher.

I like the new year. For one good reason. Everyone does a round up of all the best images of the year in a beautiful slideshow. So, like every year, I wandered through the internet, looking at different version of the year in pictures. This is where I went:

AOL

MSNBC

The Big Picture
The New York Times

Sports Illustrated

Der Spiegel

Time Magazine

And this is what I saw. Only pictures from either AP, Reuters, Getty and a little bit of EPA. All wire services, nothing else. At first I thought it was just a USA thing, but no. Even Der Spiegel, the famous German magazine did the same. Time magazine, The New York Times and Sports Illustrated decided that the best images were the ones that they had assigned, thus presenting only pictures of either staff photographers or assigned photographers.

Now, do not get me wrong. There are a lot of very talented photographers at the wire agencies, and some did an incredible job this year, but still. Ignoring photographers from Aurora, Redux, Noor, VII, Abaca, Sipa, Gamma, Reporters, Magnum, National Geographic, Minden, and so many other source, just because they are not accessible via a monthly payment is plainly ridiculous. Its pure journalistic laziness. And another pin in the machine.

All these so called photo editors who called themselves journalist either did not take the time to look around or simply refused to do so because it would cost them more money. Sad and pathetic. It is an insult to the photographic world to blindly close your eyes and the production of all these extremely talented photographers. It’s plain censorship. Economical censorship, maybe but still censorship. They will not publish and show these images because they are too expensive. Thus their readers will never see them. Not because they are bad, but because they will not pay for them.

Who is to blame ? The subscription model and the bean counters that have taken over. Who is suffering ? Everyone, since we are all deprived from seeing the real “best of” and only get to see a washed out version, pre packaged by the wires. What does it say about the state of our industry. Well, for one, that if you are not part of a wire service in 2009, you will have a hard time being published or seen. That real photo editors are disappearing and being replaced by researchers. That there is a real treasure to be mined for those who think outside the wires, and finally, that the public, the readers, are being scammed.

So all these year end “best pictures of 2008″ should be renamed “best cheap and affordable pictures of the year”, leaving room for someone with a budget, and a conscience, to do one with the real best picture of the years.

Posted in SIPA, magazine, Magnum, Aurora, TIME, photojournalism, editorial, finance, slideshow, msnbc.com, getty | Print | 1 Comment »

March 5, 2008 by pmelcher.

French photo agency Gamma, now under the umbrella of Eyedea,  recently lost a judgment for the lost of 9 210 originals. Catherine Leroy, Legendary war photographer, will receive 1,381,500 €  ( that is $ 2,108,909.49). About $228 dollars an image.

Catherine Leroy died in 2006 and was represented by her mother.

Yes, you have read this correctly. That is more than twice the price company Green Recovery paid  Hachette to purchase Gamma, Rapho, Hoaqui, Jacana, Explorer and Top last year. The purchase price was rumored  to be  € 600,000.00 or $900,000.00

Sipa has also been condemned to pay € 1,200,000 ( about $1,8 Million)   to photographer Gérard Gastaud for the lost of 43,331 of his originals. ( about $42.00 per image lost)

Apparently, if you are going to have your originals lost, you are better off moving to France first.

Seriously, however, neither agency would survive if they had to pay such penalty. Both are surviving right now and certainly cannot afford to part with more than $1 million dollar. Actually, besides Corbis, I do not know of any agency that could survive such a settlement.

I am all for compensating photographers whose images have been lost or mistreated. Especially legendary photographers like Catherine Leroy . However, I will question the intelligence of a judge who puts the settlement a such a high value that it endangers the jobs of 1,000’s of innocent people. Some common sense needs to also be applied here.

Both agencies have the right to appeal, which, in this case, I am sure they will certainly do.

More on these judgments here ( In French) : Photographie.com

Posted in SIPA, newspaper, copyright, magazine, photojournalism, finance, news, law, france, editorial, corbis | Print | No Comments »

January 8, 2008 by pmelcher.

Beyond the flashy fancy mini sites that Corbis and Getty Images have throwned to press release hungry industry newsletter and blog sites, I did a little search of my own.

If you click on any or all of these icons below, you will probably find some of the most amazing and less seen USA Election coverage. There is an advantage of being a photographer from a non “accredited” agency like Reuters/EPA for Corbis and Getty/AFP for Getty: you have no rules to follow and you get to shoot what you want.

It makes for some pretty amazing images: (click on any logo below and enjoy)

These are only a few. No Press releases. No mini sites. Just hard and pure work. VII, DigitalRailroad, Magnum, Contact Press and others had not yet made anything visible as I was writing this entry. I am sure they will. There has never been an election like this in the USA before and probably will never be again. While Corbis and Getty have gone the wire service way ( 100 photos a day covering everything and nothing), these guys are going both for the historical and the emotional route. Because the next president of the United States of America, whether the rest of the world likes it or not, is going to be the major news for the next 8 years.

Minimum.

I agree with my friend Pino Granata, Photography without passion is not photography, it’s only bored microstock.

Posted in SIPA, TIME, newspaper, alexa, Cnn, magazine, keyword, google, news, corbis, editorial, wire service, photojournalism, getty | Print | No Comments »

November 16, 2007 by pmelcher.

What fundamentally matters in photography, is the image, and not who took it. The end users, that is, the guy in the street, doesn’t care if an image has been taken by someone famous or not. He reacts to the image itself.
Photographers spend a lot of time trying to brand themselves with postcards, websites, talks and blogs and spend little or no time creating the right images .
A talented photographer is one that creates, over and over, the right images. Not the one who wins a prize for the best marketing. A Sebastiao Salgado can come out of nowhere and become one of the most succesful photo journalist ever, not because he knows how to brand himself, but because his images are unavoidable.
We have created the myth of the pro photographer and have tried to sell that rather than the photographs themselves. But a magazine and its readers only care about the photograph, not the person behind it. And certainly not the photo agency.

It is almost impossible for someone to be succesful in photojournalism. It is almost impossible for one person to always come out with the most compelling images and with the right story. This is why there are so many photographers and photo agencies around, because no one can solely claim superiority over it all. Readers expect the best, every single time, from sport to news, from celebrity paparazzi to travel. And no single photographer can achieve that. Not even a photo agency can claim a dominance.
We have to return to the cult of photography and abandon the cult of the photographers. We have to admire images for what they are regardless of who took them. We have to accept that their is no excellence in the human beings that manage photography, but there is perfection in the photographs themselves.

If we can accept that only the photographic image matters, than we can finally understand our roles.

On a somewhat related note, for your Week End lesson and

for anyone that understand French, Photojournalism legend Goksin Sipahioglu, speaks :

Posted in SIPA, newspaper, photojournalism, wire service, editorial, news | Print | No Comments »