Ryan Pyle Blog: The Death of Photojournalism

Hello.

In a bleak article posted in the New York Times a few weeks back, it appears that photojournalism as we know it is dead.....or at least in some form of cardiac arrest.

The story focuses on Gamma a French photojournalism agency that has a long and proud tradition of having photographers in the front lines of many of the world's conflict zones over the last 50 years. While Gamma has now filed for bankruptcy protection it seems that they are as much on their knees from the overall photo market - which is on a sharp decline - and the French labor laws, the latter of which seems to have induced the death blow.

We still live in a visual world and pictures are needed, but spending thousands of dollars sending photographers around the world to shoot in film is quickly becoming a distant memory. Budding photographers, like myself, have opted to base ourselves in interesting parts of the world; in an effort to attract magazines and newspapers to use skilled, and responsible, locally based photographers who have an intimate knowledge of what things are like on the ground. Thereby helping cut the costs, but maintaining the high quality, of producing a photo story. But even this is not enough.

Day rates for image makers, like myself, continue to fall and magazines continually ask me to cut back on my expenses where I can. I oblige where I can but I hope that things can turn around soon, or eventually we'll be working for US$100 per day including expenses; which doesn't exactly fund my already cheap lifestyle.

Some photographers have begun to question the business practices of the magazines and newspapers that are losing money, are they editor heavy? Have they built up a system of salaries and expenses that were funded by printed real estate adverts and personals? Now that this business has migrated online things will have to change, but freelance content producers like myself continue to get squeezed. It's true editors, and loads of full time staff, are being cut and jobs are being lost across the board, a single solution there is not. Even the New York Times, perhaps the most storied newspaper, forced a pay cut across the board and had to fire staff and close overseas bureaus.

We are in the midst of crisis and original reporting and in depth photographic work is suffering. It will be interesting to see how Gamma restructures itself and emerges from bankruptcy protection; but there could be more business failures in the coming months. Maybe my father was right, I should have gone in to banking. It's soulless, but Goldman's second quarter profits where US$3 billion. I can't believe I just said that :). New York Times story is below:
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Link to Story: CLICK HERE
Copy Write: New York Times
August 10, 2009
Lament for a Dying Field: Photojournalism

By DAVID JOLLY
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 snapped by amateurs on cellphones are posted to Web sites minutes after events have occurred. Photographers trying to make a living from shooting the news call 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 €3 million, or $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 S.C.A., which bundled it with others 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.

Today, from the point of view of the news image buyer in a magazine or newspaper, it comes down to a calculation for the photo editor: At a time of shrinking advertising revenue and layoffs, can I afford to send a photographer at a cost of $250 a day or more plus expenses? If not, I may be able to illustrate the story adequately with a “live” photo from one of the newswires or with an archival photo, both options available for a fixed monthly subscription.

“This is not a new trend; it’s the continuation of an old one,” 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’m 92 years old, and I’ve survived a lot of crises in photojournalism,” he said. “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 take on photographers full-time after using a certain amount of their work, a serious competitive disadvantage when the competition overseas employs a much greater percentage of 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 the 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 any of the major players.

At Getty, 70 percent of revenue is generated by the sale of stock images, its chief executive, Jonathan Klein, said by telephone. 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’s led to more photos being used, but at a lower price point.”

Jean-François Leroy, organizer of the Visa pour l’Image photojournalism festival, which runs in Perpignan for two weeks beginning Aug. 29, pointed to a declining emphasis in the media on serious subjects — what he called the “disease of the press” — 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 very 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 €1,700 a month, and that unpaid postproduction work on the computer was taking up ever more time.

Some photographers have taken to working for nongovernmental 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.
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Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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