PARIS — When photojournalists and their admirers gather in southern France at the end of August for Visa pour l’Image, the annual celebration of their craft, many practitioners may well be wondering how much longer they can scrape by.
Newspapers and magazines are cutting back sharply on picture budgets or going out of business altogether, and television stations have cut back on news coverage in favor of less costly fare. Pictures and video shot by amateurs on cellphones are posted to Web sites minutes after events occur. Photographers trying to make a living from shooting the news are calling it a crisis.
In the latest sign of distress, the company that owns the photo agency Gamma sought protection from creditors on July 28 after a loss of $4.2 million in the first half of the year as sales fell by nearly a third.
Gamma was founded in 1966 by the photographers Raymond Depardon and Gilles Caron. With Sygma, Sipa and, earlier, Magnum, it was one of the independent agencies that helped make Paris a world capital for photojournalism, attracting some of the best photographers the field has produced.
A Paris commercial court gave Gamma’s owner, Eyedea Presse, six months to reorganize itself. The company employs 56 people in its Paris headquarters, 14 of them photographers. Olivia Riant, a spokeswoman for Eyedea, said there would “inevitably” be job cuts to make the agency viable.
“The business model is not working today,” she said. “So without some changes, it won’t work tomorrow.”
“The problem is that news photography is finished,” Ms. Riant said. “Gamma wants to go back to magazines and newsmagazines. We will stop covering daily news events to more deeply cover issues.”
Gamma’s history shows how the market has changed. The agency was acquired in 1999 by Hachette Filipacchi Médias, a unit of Lagardère, which combined it with other operations to provide photos for its magazine empire. But the business did not prosper, and it was sold in 2007 to Green Recovery, an investment fund that buys and overhauls distressed companies.
Gamma’s rivals have fared little better: Sygma was acquired by Corbis in 1999, and Sipa by Sud Communication in 2001.
Photojournalism, often said to have begun with the American Civil War photographer Mathew Brady, experienced a golden age lasting from before World War II through the 1970s. Magazines like Time, Life and Paris Match — and virtually all of the world’s major newspapers — had the budgets to put legions of shooters on the ground in competition for the best pictures.
Stéphane Ledoux, chief of the parent company of the Gamma photo agency. The company has sought bankruptcy protection.
But today, at a time of shrinking advertising revenue and layoffs, photo editors at many publications have to think hard about sending a photographer into the field at a cost of $250 or more and expenses.
“I’m 92 years old, and I’ve survived a lot of crises in photojournalism,” said John G. Morris, a former photo editor whose résumé includes years at The New York Times (which publishes The International Herald Tribune), Life magazine and The Washington Post. “I find the present situation depressing, but I’m crazy enough to be hopeful. There have never been more images out there, and we need more help in sorting out all the information.”
Eyedea Presse said its problems were compounded by a provision of French labor law that requires agencies to take on photographers full time after using a certain amount of their work, a serious competitive disadvantage when their overseas competition employs many freelancers.
“We held out as long as we could, but this business model just isn’t viable anymore,” Stéphane Ledoux, the Eyedea chief executive, said after the court hearing. “They’ve killed French photojournalism by requiring the agencies to make salaried employees of the freelancers.”
French photographers acknowledge that problem, but they say agency managers exaggerate it to justify job cuts.
The major newswires — The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters, along with regional powerhouses like Kyodo in Japan and Xinhua in China — dominate news photography. But the business of marketing and selling digitized pictures is led by two global companies: Getty Images, founded in 1995, and Corbis, founded in 1989 by the Microsoft chairman, Bill Gates.
The stock photo companies rose to prominence by buying up hundreds of image archives and making them available for sale online. While they do continue to sponsor photojournalism — Getty Images employs 130 photographers around the world — the companies are, in effect, services for managing digital property rights.
If Eyedea Presse were to be liquidated, its archives of nearly 33 million images, including those from Gamma, Rapho and Keystone, would be a valuable addition to the collections of any of the major players.
At Getty, 70 percent of revenue is generated by the sale of stock images, said its chief executive, Jonathan Klein. With the addition of resources it calls on through a partnership with Agence France-Presse, Mr. Klein said the agency was gaining market share at the expense of the newswires.
“Photojournalism means the photographers can tell the story themselves in pictures, and there were places where they could publish those photos,” Mr. Klein said. “In the print world, many, if not most, of those places have since disappeared.”
Still, he said, there are reasons to be optimistic, because “thanks to the Web, there are now billions of pages for photographers to show their work,” he added. That has led to more photos being used, he said, but at lower prices.
Jean-François Leroy, organizer of the Visa pour l’Image photojournalism festival, which runs in Perpignan, France, for two weeks beginning Aug. 29, pointed to a declining emphasis in the media on serious subjects as another problem.
“Photographers are producing plenty of great stuff, but now the media seem interested only in celebrities,” he said. “When Michael Jackson died, it wasn’t part of the news, it was the news. How many photographs of his funeral did we really need?”
Mr. Leroy said he would advise budding photojournalists to think carefully about their commitment to the calling. Twenty years ago, a photojournalist made enough money to live on, he said. “I’m not pretending you would get rich, but you were able to live decently,” he said. “That is not the case now.”
Lorenzo Virgili, a veteran photographer in Paris, said the average salary of a freelance photographer was about $2,400 a month, and that unpaid postproduction work on the computer was taking up ever more time.
Some photographers have taken to working for advocacy organizations, large institutions or companies to continue doing what they love, Mr. Virgili said. But that arrangement is ultimately unsatisfactory, he said, because “as a journalist you have a professional ethic, and by working for them you risk compromising your neutrality, you lose your independence.”
Ten years ago, Dirck Halstead, who spent 29 years as a White House photographer for Time magazine, wrote in Digital Journalist: “When I speak of photojournalism as being dead, I am talking only about the concept of capturing a single image on a nitrate film plane, for publication in mass media.”
Visual storytelling has itself been around since the Stone Age, he noted, and “will only be enhanced” by the changes now taking place. Revisiting that column last month, Mr. Halstead wrote that, if anything, conditions today were worse than he had predicted. To be a photojournalist today, he wrote, “You have to be crazy.”
“Those people who will do anything to come back with a story will be out there shooting for a long time,” he concluded.
No comments:
Post a Comment