no more games...
Tuesday, February 28, 2006
Let UB2 Begin!
Especially now that we occupy this tiny corner of the blogosphere, FogStock is pleased to announce our own small participation in Ultimate Blogger 2. Was it just a year ago that a bunch of cool kids over at Urban Honking took our culture's limitless capacity for self confession, blended it up with Reality TV and Blogging, and produced the first edition of UB2?
This year's campaign to winnow 13 blogriffic entrants down to the ultimate blogmaster of the universe is underway; look for FogStock's participation to take a more public face when we assist with the judging of the photoblogging segment in a couple of weeks.
More important than that, look for the culture of blogging, and of the creative energy that envelopes the environmennt around FogStock's Portland headquarters, to take a public face in the photography we represent in the weeks to come.
posted by fogged @ 3:49 PM 0 comments
what does communication look like?
Thursday, February 23, 2006
People holding cell phones, evidently. At least according to the search engines at Getty, Veer, Jupiter, Corbis, iStockPhoto and our own FogStock. Among those agencies, only iStockPhoto offers a sort that reflects which images actually get used by customers. Go here, click the By Download check box, and see the cell phones disappear.
"Is it certain that to the word communication corresponds a concept that is unique, univocal, rigorously controllable, and transmittable: in a word, communicable?" Jacques Derrida, Signature Event Context
posted by fogged @ 2:18 PM 0 comments
the end of the story
Thursday, February 09, 2006
It wasn't my fault. Really. When I tried to make an arcane allusion to the shared fortunes of conventional stock photography super-conglomerates like Getty Images and upstart micropayment competitors like iStockPhoto, I wasn't thinking that they might soon be one. But it also seemed obvious that a company like Getty could not long ignore the lure of low prices and online community provided by iStockPhoto and its competitors.
posted by fogged @ 2:40 PM 0 comments
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 0 comments
picture zero
Friday, February 03, 2006
Where we started...
posted by fogged @ 9:57 PM 0 comments