stock photography 101
Wednesday, February 08, 2006
I've been thinking more about what kinds of pictures I want to show here, but it occurs to me that many people might not really know what a stock photography agency is. And some of them might be friends of mine, or my mom, so they know that I do something ambiguously related to photography, but... what? So it might be helpful to talk a little about what an agency does, and that might explain why the first picture we uploaded to our website (in 2001) and our blog (a couple of days ago) was Santa Claus.
In the old days, prior to the invention of globally distributed shared human consciousness, stock agencies were archives of photographs, and clients could license the right to use specific photographs for a fee. Sometimes, the agencies were based on historical or institutional archives, but more commonly they were entrepreneurial concerns that gathered files of (hopefully) marketable images that might appeal to clients, especially those who needed images for commercial uses. Visualize generically pretty pictures that might appear in magazine advertisements or brochures.
The right image was a win-win for the photographer, agency and client. The successful photographer got a residual stream of income from images that might not have otherwise made money (typically outtakes from assignments). The agency got a cut of the sale and the chance to do it again tomorrow. And the client solved a problem without expending the time and money needed to hire and art-direct a photographer. The biggest hassle was keeping up with the film.
These days, the basic business model is still the pretty much the same, but everything is totally different. Because of digital photography and the Internet, it often makes more sense to think of an agency as a database, and to think of the business of the agency as database management. And because of corporate conglomeration, it often makes more sense to think of the stock photography industry as the elephant in the room.
Not that conventional stock photography agencies are the only interesting or useful databases of images around these days. Or that established conglomerates are the end of the story. But we'll come back to that.
posted by fogged @ 9:19 PM
