EXPOSURE TO LIGHT
Digital Dangers
The New Forces that Threaten Photojournalism
It has never been easy to make a living as a photojournalist, but shifting market forces and corporate practices, both abetted by changes in technology, are making it even harder.
Who or what is to blame? Some photographers focus on Corbis and Getty, two corporate titans that are, in quite different ways, bringing about a seismic shift in the way the business of photojournalism is conducted. Still, as sometimes happens in photography, the picture is not tack-sharp.
First, consider Corbis. On January 28, 2002, the employees of the Sygma photography agency went on strike. Dressed in black, photographers and staff lay like corpses on the floor of their Paris offices to protest a new contract that Sygma’s American parent company, Corbis, was trying to impose. At issue was the proposed conversion of all Sygma photographers to free-lance status, under which they would have to assume all the costs of producing their work instead of sharing them with the agency as before. Furthermore, free-lance photographers, under French law, would be ineligible for press cards and health benefits. A mood of outrage took hold, with Sygma photographers sending out a press release that claimed “the future of a whole profession — photojournalism — is being wagered.” After sixteen days, Corbis announced the “redundancy” of all forty-two Sygma photographers based in Paris, along with the downsizing of the agency’s support staff by almost half. Its smaller American contingent, based in New York, had already quit by then, disgusted with Corbis’s management of the agency.
Although the contractual dispute was bitter enough in itself, the Sygma affair aroused particularly strong passions because Corbis is wholly owned by Bill Gates. His acquisition of Sygma and several other photo agencies represented, for many photographers, a brazen attempt to seize control of their work, to enrich Gates’s giant online collection of images while exploiting those who create the images. Henri Cartier-Bresson, at age ninety-three the senior member of the French photojournalistic establishment, wrote that he was “scandalized by the casualness and the cruelty of the massive firing . . . . The compilation of an image bank, as well stocked as it might be, will never match the work of an author,” he wrote. “On one side is a machine; on the other is a living and sensitive being. Corbis offers no choice.”
Aside from the obvious elements of Franco-American culture clash, the Corbis-Sygma debacle crystallized an industry-wide sense that the business of photojournalism is changing rapidly and for the worse — at least as far as photographers are concerned. The Corbis press office, in a letter sent to a British photojournalists’ Web site during the strike, explained the situation this way: “It is important to understand that the global market for news and editorial images has been changing in significant ways over the past few years with much less demand for daily spot news and ‘hard news,’ an increase in demand for life-style, celebrity, and feature stories of global interest, and a client preference for digital images. Corbis has begun to shift its news and editorial business to meet these changing demands.”
The story of Corbis begins with picture frames on the walls of Bill and Melinda Gates’s house — digital picture frames or “interactive home systems,” to be precise. With this ingenious contrivance, the Gateses could download pictures from the Web or CD-ROMs and view them hanging on the wall. If they got bored with a picture, another was available at the click of a remote. The initial idea was to license paintings from museums worldwide and digitize them.
Then Gates, being Gates, got to thinking bigger. Images, whether fine art, journalism, illustration, or what have you, would be the emerging dominant commodity of the Internet era. Via the Web, more and more images than ever before could be delivered instantaneously, and Gates could be the one to profit from this. So in 1989 he founded Corbis, initially to license images from museums. By 1995, under the guidance of ceo Steve Davis, Corbis had expanded its mandate by buying up the Bettmann Archive, one of the world’s largest collections of documentary images. Of the thirteen or so million images to which Corbis owns the copyright, Bettmann alone accounts for eleven million. In addition, Corbis possesses licensing rights for countless more images — as many as 80 million. Along with Bettmann, Corbis also absorbed the photo archives of UPI, the now defunct news wire service.
In the late ’90s Corbis decided to add more news and stock photography to its holdings. After acquiring stock and celebrity services like Stock Market and Outline, Corbis swallowed Sygma, Saba, Kipa, and Tempsport — news agencies, mostly based in Europe, that represented the old way of doing business in photojournalism: the agency got assignments for the photographers, arranged the logistics for their reporting trips, and advanced them money when necessary; in return, it got a cut of the royalties from the sale and resale of the pictures. The agency also helped the photographers protect their copyrights. (Magnum, founded in 1947, was actually a cooperative owned by photographers.) A crop of agencies, including Sygma, proliferated in the 1960s, and over the next two decades built a reputation for high quality and journalistic integrity. Unfortunately, they did not build a reputation for practicality or financial probity. Corbis, when it acquired Sygma, was initially looked upon as a white knight that would rescue the mismanaged agency from ruin.
So how did Corbis end up being loathed as “the ultimate threat to photographers,” in the words of the veteran news photographer and photojournalism pundit Dirck Halstead? In part, the relationship between Sygma and Corbis deteriorated because it was founded on a misunderstanding. Corbis executives mistakenly believed that by acquiring Sygma, Corbis would own Sygma’s archives, that it would immediately gain the copyrights to millions of images. They assumed that since most Sygma photographers were technically salaried employees, their pictures would become the property of the company. But under French copyright law, a photographer automatically owns the rights to his work for life, even if done as an employee.
Once Corbis realized that it hadn’t actually bought the images, only human capital, it lost interest in putting money into the agency. Corbis didn’t think it was worth investing in images whose copyrights it wouldn’t own. By reducing photographers to the status of independent contractors, Corbis would avoid having to pay their costs and would just make money on licensing. In other words, it would be pure profit for Corbis. As Patrick Durand, a French Sygma photographer, complained to the Web site The Digital Journalist, “It’s a perfect plan for them: we work on our own, pay all the incumbent costs (our expenses, our film, etc.), try to make the first sales and bring Corbis the material, which they only have to sell.”
The misunderstandings went both ways. In one case, an attempt by Corbis to register copyrights on behalf of its photographers was misinterpreted by the photographers as a plot to grab their copyrights. In another incident, Dirck Halstead wrote a column in The Digital Journalist complaining that Corbis’s Web site was offering his photographs, taken when he was with UPI, with no byline, only “photograph by Corbis.” Pulitzer Prize-winning photos of the Vietnam War by Tim Page and Kyoichi Sawada were also without attribution. But instead of being a nefarious scheme to separate works from their creators, the lack of bylines was simply a product of human error, and not even Corbis’s error, at that. It turned out that UPI’s huge archives had been spotty, and many images came to Corbis without proper attribution.
Misunderstandings aside, the photojournalistic community continues to see Corbis as a plague. Part of this may be due to an inevitable clash of cultures. Peter Howe, a longtime photojournalist and photo editor who was vice-president for photography and creative services at Corbis from 1998 to 2000 (see page 23), explains that “the photojournalist culture is loose — ‘my word is my bond.’” Corbis, meanwhile, “comes from a paranoid software culture — paranoid for good reason, because software is the easiest thing to rip off that you could imagine . . . . Of course, photographers are a paranoid bunch too, also for good reasons.”
Howe believes that emotional factors are not to be neglected, either. “Being a photojournalist is a kind of lowly existence,” he says. “You need physical and emotional support, long-distance hand-holding. Corbis has completely removed that element. With them, it’s just a financial arrangement.” Not that a financial arrangement wasn’t needed. “Photojournalism needed someone with business sense to give it a kick in the backside,” Howe says. “Photojournalists are totally incapable of balancing a checkbook, hopeless. So they needed Corbis and Getty, but Corbis and Getty are turning it into a factory business.”
Another cause of resentment has to do with archives. Corbis has been remiss in returning slides and negatives to photographers who have terminated their relationship with the agency and asked to get them back. One of them, Allan Tannenbaum, is suing Corbis to recover his pictures and to get an accounting of royalties owed. If he is successful, at least two other photographers say they will do the same. While Tannenbaum believes that Corbis’s delays are a tactic to grab photographers’ rights, other photographers are willing to chalk it up to the company’s legendary inefficiency.
The Corbis culture didn’t fit photojournalism’s in other ways as well. Corbis failed to appreciate the difference between stock and news photography, because its Internet bias led it to treat all images alike. Stock photographers can afford to front the money for their work because re-licensing guarantees them a high return on investment. News photographers generally can’t afford to front money, not only because the licensing potential is less but also because the cost of producing reportage, especially in foreign countries, is very high.
And in the end, Corbis really got little for its pains. Sygma isn’t much of a player in the news business anymore. “Sygma is more or less dead,” says Frederic Neema, a French photographer who quit Sygma a year and a half ago. “Magazines aren’t going to call them.” And with the firing of the Sygma photographers, Corbis has lost most of its major talent. It still represents the work of fifty photographers from Saba, another agency it took over, but SABA’s clout, too, has been compromised, by the resignation of its founder, Marcel Saba. Rick Boeth, Corbis’s director of photography for global news, says the company is trying to reestablish relationships with former Sygma photographers on a “free-lance model.” Boeth arrived at Corbis three days before the mass firing. “I’m part of the rebuilding effort,” he says. “We’re trying to help photographers establish themselves as independent contractors.” When asked how many he has signed up, he will only say, “a relatively small number.”
Corbis is not by any means the only entity trying to reorganize photojournalism. The French publishing giant Hachette Filipacchi recently swallowed the Gamma photo agency, and Getty Images, co-founded in 1995 by the oil heir Mark Getty, has acquired Newsmakers, Liaison, Allsport, and Online USA — taking on a large contingency of photojournalists and essentially turning them into day laborers. Getty, a patron of the International Center of Photography and sponsor of the Infinity Awards for photojournalism, famously declared that “intellectual property is the oil of the twenty-first century.”
Ironically, considering all the invective that has been heaped on Corbis, its archrival Getty is the one to watch. “Corbis was seen as the big evil conglomerate,” says Peter Howe. “But Corbis has been mostly inept, while Getty is very ept at forcing conditions on photographers which are far more onerous.” Corbis photographers’ contract still guarantees a 40 percent to 50 percent split on royalties, but the vast majority of news photographers at Getty operate on a work-for-hire basis, which means that they are paid a salary and Getty owns the entire copyright, with no royalties for the photographer. Some are stringers who get paid a day rate; they don’t own their pictures either. A few photographers who came in with the agencies Getty took over still work on the old deal. One of them, Roger Le Moyne, says Getty does better sales and distribution than Liaison used to. “Corbis went first and made all the mistakes they could have made and showed Getty what not to do,” he says. Michael Sargent, vice-president for news services at Getty, explains the situation this way: “We continue to work with legacy photographers on a 50/50 revenue split, but it’s a shrinking group, to be honest with you. We’re going more toward a work-for-hire arrangement.”
What kind of photographer would sign up for such terms? Generally speaking, it is usually the younger ones who are willing to tolerate exploitation in return for a chance to take exciting pictures and establish their names. Sargent admits as much: “I’m looking for young and aspiring photographers who just want to take pictures. I give them a chance to flourish and develop. I give them the latest digital cameras and laptops. I would challenge anyone to find a disgruntled photographer in this group.” Asked to cite an example of a young photographer who has flowered under Getty’s tutelage, Sargent names Tyler Hicks, who won the ICP Infinity Award this year for his reportage from the battlefields of Afghanistan. However, Hicks has quit Getty to be a full-time staff photographer for The New York Times.
Sargent was an editor at wire services for twenty-seven years, and indeed, Getty’s model is the wire service. AP, Agence France Presse, and Reuters have photographers on staff, as well as stringers, none of whom own any rights. Older photographers tend to be aghast at the idea of giving up ownership. The New York-based, ex-Sygma photographer Rick Maiman says, “Young people coming into the business now are not aware that ownership is king. In the agency model, you retain ownership. If you wanted to die with your boots on, you went with an agency. In the wire service model, you’re just a hired finger, fat and happy. But when you leave AP, you get your gold watch and a helping shove out the door.” Sargent has little time for such sentiments. “Let’s face it,” he says, “This business has gone through enormous changes. The photographers who are truly concerned about it recognize this and adapt. There’s an angry strain of photographers who can’t step away from the legacy years and adapt to changing times. They’re the ones we can’t work with.”
The business is changing, and it’s unlikely that we will see a wholesale return to old ways. The new regime in photojournalism is intimately bound up with the Internet and the modes of interaction the Internet imposes. To buy pictures from Corbis or Getty, an editor now selects, downloads, and pays for an image, all online, and so do the wire services. At the old agencies, Dirck Halstead recalls, “people had worked there all their lives and knew intuitively what was in those boxes. That doesn’t exist anymore. There are no individual picture requests; you have to do it all online.” It is arguable that this system brings about a greater homogeneity of pictures and a lack of communication between editors and photographers, to the journalistic detriment of the product.
The Web does provide photographers with a way to market their own work directly via personal sites. With a sufficient initial outlay of money, a photographer could outfit himself with the requisite technology and realize 100 percent return on royalties, as well as establishing his own “brand.” The problem is that to mount a one-person online sales operation is just too time-consuming for most photographers. And besides, without the kind of access that an agency has, a Web site might not be able to make enough sales to justify the effort. There are some promising Web sites (see sidebar) that showcase sophisticated photojournalistic work and allow photographers a degree of freedom rarely available in traditional media. Although they generally either don’t pay for pictures or pay very little, that could eventually change.
One major reason why the industry has been undergoing a sea change is that the nationwide newshole has been shrinking for quite some time, partly due to economic factors but also due to public apathy, or at least a perception of public apathy. After September 11, it suddenly seemed as if the public had rediscovered an appetite for hard news, especially foreign news. And equally suddenly, a traditional cooperative photographers’ agency appeared on the scene. Called VII after the seven charter members — four of whom had left SABA — its mission statement says it was “formed in response to the dramatic changes taking place in the ownership, representation, and distribution of photojournalism.” September 11 put VII in the game in a way no one could have predicted. By pure chance, the new agency was announced just five days before the terrorist attacks, and its most famous member, the Time magazine war photographer James Nachtwey, lives a few blocks from the World Trade Center site. Nachtwey got back to New York from abroad on September 10 and was at Ground Zero almost immediately after the first plane hit, getting some of the best pictures of the day. And presumably getting top dollar for them.
Could VII represent a new movement of photographers retaking
control of their own work in an atmosphere of renewed interest
in photojournalism? Not every agency can count on recruiting star
members who are already on contract to major publications, as
the founders of VII are, and the mood of September 11, like all
things, shall pass, if it hasn’t already.
But this much seems true: people still want to see newsworthy,
aesthetically satisfying pictures, and there are plenty of talented
photographers out there who are willing to risk hardship and poverty
to make them — and searching for ways to make a living at
it.
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