"Rethink everything you know about photography"

This is an excerpt from an article I wrote suggesting that photographers start to look into new ways of doing business.

Published in the Winter 2004 ASMP Bulletin
© 2004 Stanley Rowin

Photo Ecology 101

"Rethink everything you know about photography," declares the headline in Hewlett-Packard's 24-page advertisement launched in October. Here's a computer manufacturer trying to wrest control of those "Kodak Moments" from the film companies. For several years now the ASMP has been detailing how the ecosystem of the photography profession is changing dramatically. We obviously aren't the only ones affected.

Earlier this year, ASMP Executive Director Gene Mopsik and I were invited to the annual meeting of the Picture Archive Council of America (PACA). PACA is the trade organization for stock agencies. Their goal is to "develop uniform business practices within the stock photography industry, based upon ethical standards established by the Council." If you know the stock photo industry, you know it is dominated by two giants. Yet there were scores of PACA member agencies at this meeting who are trying to survive and to compete with the giants. Gene and I made several interesting observations at the meeting. One was how the independents try not to be dominated by the giants, both at the meeting and in the market. To succeed, the smaller agencies have to learn the giants' weaknesses and concentrate on exploiting them. If you want to survive in the new photo-ecosystem as an independent photographer, you will have to do something similar.

It is important for us to look at companies surviving in industries that face the same obstacles we do. Take for instance the music industry. We all hear industry claims that file sharing is ruining the music industry. The file sharers counter that the music industry lost track of its market. They say the lack of good music at affordable prices, not file sharing, has caused the downturn.

In my research on survivors in down-spiraling industries, I looked at the latest weekly BILLBOARD 200 album chart. I found that the top six entries in this category are CDs that offer more than just 10 or 12 music tracks. They are CDs in which the artists have thrown something extra in the package: an EP of extra songs, access to online content, a chance to meet the musician or two CDs for the price of one. The artists with the top sales numbers are the artists who recognize the need to add extra value to make the sale. That's a lesson ASMP has been trying to teach our members for years. Find the extra value or unique quality in your work and exploit it. Competing solely on price is destructive, both to you and to the industry.

Another item of interest at the PACA meeting was the obvious change in the role of the photo "agency." In the beginning, stock photo agencies licensed the work of contributors and took an average of 50 percent of the gross sale price. The photographer got the other half of the sale. As catalogues and digital imaging came along, the photographer was asked to cover more overhead for catalogue printing and image scanning. Eventually the "agencies" stopped having an agency relationship with their former partner, the photographer. Some agencies no longer wanted the fiduciary responsibility of representing or protecting the photographer. Now they were protecting their shareholders' return on investment. Photographers went from being business partners to vendors who supplied "assets" to their stock agencies. One extreme example of an agency turning on its photographers is the Penny Gentieu case Victor Perlman examines in this issue, on page 18.

As stock agencies spent more money developing expensive web sites and catalogues, and hiring more people to answer the phones to improve their customer service, they felt the need to recover more of their investments. Because of the very competitive climate some of them actually helped create, the market currently won't let them easily increase their prices for some images. To recover the extra investment in overhead, some stock companies are choosing to lower the percentage paid to the photographer, or worse, reshooting some images in house by staff or work-for-hire photographers in order keep 100 percent of the future commissions. The independent freelance photographer is no longer needed.

Should photographers continue to complain that the new environment is unfair, or should we evolve? The ASMP is offering two traveling education programs, which will help you evolve. Each one deals with a different aspect of the new ecosystem. You can read more information about this on page 22 and on our website at www.asmp.org.

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