Ryan Pyle Blog: The Shrinking Path

Hello,

Well, it appears that being a photographer is actually as bleak as everyone says it is. Even house wives are able to earn an income from Getty Images. Read below. Time to dust off that degree in accounting.

Please follow this LINK to the original story.
The article is also posted below.
Copywrite: New York Times
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March 29, 2010
For Photographers, the Image of a Shrinking Path

By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD

By the time Matt Eich entered photojournalism school in 2004, the magazine and newspaper business was already declining.

But Mr. Eich had been shooting photographs since he was a child, and when he married and had a baby during college, he stuck with photography as a career.

“I had to hit the ground running and try to make enough money to keep a roof over our heads,” he said.

Since graduation in 2008, Mr. Eich, 23, has gotten magazine assignments here and there, but “industrywide, the sentiment now, at least among my peers, is that this is not a sustainable thing,” he said. He has been supplementing magazine work with advertising and art projects, in a pastiche of ways to earn a living. “There was a path, and there isn’t anymore.”

Then there is D. Sharon Pruitt, a 40-year-old mother of six who lives on Hill Air Force Base in Utah. Ms. Pruitt’s husband is in the military, and their frequent moves meant a full-time job was not practical. But after a vacation to Hawaii in 2006, Ms. Pruitt uploaded some photos — taken with a $99 Kodak digital camera — to the site Flickr.

Since then, through her Flickr photos, she has received a contract with the stock-photography company Getty Images that gives her a monthly income when publishers or advertisers license the images. The checks are sometimes enough to take the family out to dinner, sometimes almost enough for a mortgage payment. “At the moment, it’s just great to have extra money,” she said.

Mr. Eich and Ms. Pruitt illustrate the huge shake-up in photography during the last decade. Amateurs, happy to accept small checks for snapshots of children and sunsets, have increasing opportunities to make money on photos but are underpricing professional photographers and leaving them with limited career options. Professionals are also being hurt because magazines and newspapers are cutting pages or shutting altogether.

“There are very few professional photographers who, right now, are not hurting,” said Holly Stuart Hughes, editor of the magazine Photo District News.

That has left professional photographers with a bit of an identity crisis. Nine years ago, when Livia Corona was fresh out of art school, she got assignments from magazines like Travel and Leisure and Time. Then, she said, “three forces coincided.”

They were the advertising downturn, the popularity and accessibility of digital photography, and changes in the stock-photo market.

Magazines’ editorial pages tend to rise or fall depending on how many ad pages they have. In 2000, the magazines measured by Publishers Information Bureau, a trade group, had 286,932 ad pages. In 2009, there were 169,218 — a decline of 41 percent. That means less physical space in which to print photographs.

“Pages are at a premium, and there’s more competition to get anything into a magazine now, and the bar is just higher for excellent work,” said Bill Shapiro, the editor of Life.com, who ran the print revival of Life before Time Inc. shut it in 2007. And that is for the publications that survived — 428 magazines closed in 2009 alone, according to the publication database MediaFinder.com, including ones that regularly assigned original photography, like Gourmet, Portfolio and National Geographic Adventure.

And while magazines once sniffed at stock photographs, which are existing images, not original assignments, shrinking editorial budgets made them reconsider.

“When we began, stock photography or licensed images, preshot images being licensed, was perceived as the armpit of the photo industry,” said Jonathan Klein, the chief executive of Getty Images who helped found the agency in 1995. “No self-respecting art director or creative director would use a preshot image, because it wasn’t original, it hadn’t been commissioned by them, it wasn’t their creativity.”

At the same time, the Internet has made it easier for editors to find and license stock photos — they can do it in seconds with a search term and a few clicks, rather than spending seven weeks mailing film transparencies back and forth.

Concurrently, digital photography took off. “It used to be you really needed to know how to use a camera,” said Keith Marlowe, a photographer who has worked for Spin and Rolling Stone. “If you messed up a roll, you couldn’t redo the concert.” Now, though, any photographer can instantly see if a shot is good, or whether the light balances or other technical aspects need to be adjusted.

That meant a flood of pretty decent photographs, and that changed the stock-photography industry. In the last few years, stock agencies have created or acquired so-called microstock divisions. They charge $1 to $100, in most cases, for publishers or others to rerun a photo, often supplied by an amateur. And Getty made a deal with Flickr in 2008, permitting Getty’s photo editors to comb through customers’ images and strike license agreements with the amateur photographers.

“The quality of licensed imagery is virtually indistinguishable now from the quality of images they might commission,” Mr. Klein said. Yet “the price point that the client, or customer, is charged is a fraction of the price point which they would pay for a professional image.”

In 2005, Getty Images licensed 1.4 million preshot commercial photos. Last year, it licensed 22 million — and “all of the growth was through our user-generated business,” Mr. Klein said. That is because amateurs are largely happy to be paid anything for their photos. “People that don’t have to make a living from photography and do it as a hobby don’t feel the need to charge a reasonable rate,” Mr. Eich said.

With stock-photography payments declining and magazines pulling back on original assignments, some Web sites like Life.com and BurnMagazine.org have popped up as homes for original photography. Life commissions about two projects a month — it sent Mr. Marlowe to Haiti after the earthquake, for instance, and the entertainment photographer Jeff Vespa to cover the European news media tour by the “Avatar” cast.

There seems to be an audience for professional photography on these sites. The average number of photos each visitor viewed for “Michael Jackson: The Memorial” at Life.com was 41, for example, and for “Oscars 2010: The Best Dresses,” it was 38 images.

Still, the pay, compared with print, is “less, for sure,” Mr. Shapiro of Life.com said, since some professional photographers “are really more excited for the exposure than they are to drive a hard bargain.”

But it is hard to live on exposure alone. And some professionals worry that with ways to make a salary in photography disappearing, the impact will be severe.

“The important thing that a photojournalist does is they know how to tell the story — they know they’re not there to skew, interpret or bias,” said Katrin Eismann, chairwoman of the Masters in Digital Photography program at the School of Visual Arts in New York. “A photographer can go to a rally or demonstration, and they can make it look as though 10 people showed up, or 1,000 people showed up, and that’s a big difference. I’m not sure I’m going to trust an amateur to understand how important that visual communication is. Can an amateur take a picture as good as a professional? Sure,” Ms. Eismann said. “Can they do it on demand? Can they do it again? Can they do it over and over? Can they do it when a scene isn’t that interesting?”

But amateurs like Ms. Pruitt do not particularly care. “I never followed any traditional photography rules only because I didn’t know of any — I never went to photography school, never took any classes,” she said. “People don’t know the rules, so they just shoot what they like — and other people like it, too.”
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Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle Blog: Magazine Revenue 2009

Hello.

It pains me to have to bring this kind of stuff up all the time, but I thought it was important to publish this list. The list in question is the 2009 revenue from the Magazine Publishers of America. And for people like me, who depend on publishers to spend money on images, it makes bleak reading.

A few highlights on the list:

1) The overall average for the difference in revenue between 2008 and 2009 is -18.1%. That means that on average each magazine lost 17% revenue from 2008 to 2009. No small number. Hence the massive layoffs and huge reduction in picture purchasing, especially in assignments to create original imagery.

2) US News and World Report, once a major picture buyer and huge publisher of photojournalism, was down 88% compared to 2008.

3) Portfolio Magazine, one of my clients, went bust.

4) People Magazine was up 3.8%. Maybe I should start up a celebrity photography business in China.

5) National Geographic was down 14%; and NG's other titles like Adventure (which went bust) and Traveler were down at least 30% from 2008.

6) Organic Gardening was up 16% year on year with 2008. Plant photograph anyone?

And the rest makes pretty tough reading. You'll have to follow the link below to see the actual numbers, I couldn't find a format to properly download the statistics and have them cropped in to my blog. Please see below.

LINK: Magazine Publishers of America

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Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle Blog: The Recession Photographer

Hello,

For a moment I would like to stop and reflect back to last year at this time, spirits were high and I was running like a mad man around China on assignment for various magazines and newspapers. Which is to say that I was kept busy by other people, it was a wonderful time.

Today I am chillin' out in front of my computer in jogging pants and sipping my tea wondering where it all went wrong. So far this year I've had just a handful of assignments, and almost no corporate work to speak of. With budgets being slashed and staff employees being made redunent, the publishing industry is in a real tailspin at the moment.

Surely the situation is not helped by the fact that the advertising industry is also in a bit of a bind, huge spenders like General Motors and Nike have made significant cutbacks to their spending budgets - affecting magazine and newspapers revenues; hence the chopping of employees and reductions in the use of freelancers.

While I pray that this kind of industry gloom doesn't last too much longer, the long term prospects for magazines and newspapers still seem bleak. But without getting too far ahead of myself, how does a freelance photographer make it through a recession?

First off, I don't pretend to be in possession of an expert opinion; but a few observations I have might be of interest. While assignments may be in a bit of a lull at the moment with budget restraints, magazines and newspapers still need to publish; so my guess is they are buying a boat load of stock. In my business my stock sales have increased significantly over last year at this time, partially because I have more images but also perhaps because of these restricted budgets. A magazine can put together a feature for a couple hundred dollars worth of stock pictures, where assigning a photographer for original images might cost thousands. It's true the impact of the stock images might not be as powerful as original images but during a belt tightening time, belts need to be tightened and money needs to be saved.

So what can freelance photographs do to ride out the storm? Well, the same as most companies - use the cash you've saved up to continue doing business. I have a small savings account I keep just for freelancing assignments on my own, which I then turn around and pitch to magazines and newspapers as work I've done on spec. At the end of the day a strong picture is a strong picture is a strong picture, and whether you take that image on an assignment on street shooting on your own time - it'll still have a chance at publication. When it is all said and done we are image makers, and if too many days go by without making images then it'll negatively affect us. Now of course I don't mean just running around with your head cut off and shooting anything you see, but taking the time and organizing a well thought out story or feature on your own can be a incredibly rewarding experience; and if it has a chance at being published than that's all the better. If not then those same images can be used as entries for competitions or part of a larger portfolio of work.

Getting out and shooting is never a waste of time, sitting around and waiting for the phone to ring is. There are a billion stories out there to be told, I say keep shooting no matter what. Well that's my two cents.

If anyone has an interesting story or observation about how the economic slowdown might be affecting their business I would love to hear it, either privately or publicly in the comments of this blog. I just read recently that even some of the photographers winning major awards this year haven't had a 2009 assignment. Difficult times indeed.

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Cheers,

Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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