It has been announced that photographers Stephen Ferry and Karen Kasmauski will both be awarded a $15,000 "Grant for Good" by Getty Images.
Ferry plans to use the money on his project "Chronicle of a Death Foretold: Widespread Threats and Political Violence Against Colombian Civilians".
Kasmauski plans to use the money to create photo and video essays to show a sense of the Cumberland Mountains and the people living there (Save Our Cumberland Mountains).
So that's all well and good. Both photographers (and their projects) are very deserving of this award. I would however, like to briefly look at the other side of the coin.
In my opinion, fifteen grand is not a whole lot of money when you're trying to produce good photography. I would guess both photographers, at one point in there careers, billed that much for a single editorial job. Sadly, because of poor management by the corporations that own the magazines, these kind of editorial journalism gigs are pretty much gone.
To put it into perspective, a magazine could easily have spent $30,000 for a photographer to spend a single day traveling with the President on an overseas trip. Now, as far as I can tell, there aren't any magazines doing this (on a regular basis).
So, I think it is a bit silly for Getty's head of content Andrew Delaney to say (in the press release announcing the award),
“It is extraordinary to see that so many photographers and non-profits are teaming to develop new imagery on a wide range of social issues, including the arts, education, human rights, health, poverty, peace and the environment,”
Where else would you like them to look for support to produce their work?
Now, I'm not blaming Getty for destroying the editorial market, but in my opinion they sure didn't help the situation. I mean, Getty didn't force anyone to publish watered-down, non-exclusive, homogenized content, they just produced and undercharged for it (in my opinion).
Then of course, the magazine bean-counters couldn't resist the bargain, and the editors failed to justify the expense associated with producing unique content. Sure, failure to properly sell their ads on the internet plays a part, but at the end of day, if people don't have a reason to read your magazine (regardless of how they access it), they certainly don't have a reason to look at the advertisements that you sell.
Maybe someone should have explained this to the bean-counters also.
Now, in the past photographers would also apply for grants, work with different NGO's and other non-profits to produce work like what Ferry and Kasmauski are pursuing, but there were other avenues as well.
Fifteen grand? As little as ten years ago, that would have been a bargain for many magazines. The first step for a photographer looking to fund a long term project would have been to visit every magazine editor they could think of. They might repackage the idea to fit different editorial needs, but in the end they'd still be raising money for THEIR project.
After you made the rounds in New York, you or your agency would make similar pitches in the European and Asian markets.
If you had talent and a good idea, you could easily have two or three grand from ten different magazines in which to use for your project. Which to me sounds a lot better than going through all of the hassles of winning a grant.
Now, say something was happening too fast and you had to hop on a plane. There was a system in place for this also. As you were in the air, your agency would make deals with different magazines around the world for a certain financial guarantee. More than likely the guarantee would be to just SEE what the photographer produced. The price to actually publish the images would still have to be negotiated.
The only reason I mention this, is that the whole guarantee system, in my opinion, started to fall apart when Getty made all (or quite nearly all of) their material available for editors to see for free online.
That, in my opinion was a huge blow to the photographers, the agencies and the quality of work ultimately printed in the magazines. This move was the start of the "good enough is good enough" mindset that infected the editorial magazine world.
With Getty's online based business model, the agencies also lost the research fees that were normally charged to clients for delivering images. These fees, usually somewhere between $50 and $150 depending on the nature of the request, could account for about 30% of an agency's income.
Money that has now completely disappeared.
Remember, that too was for just seeing the images. In order to publish the images, it would cost more.
So, Getty photographers, what's the average image licensing fee you see on your statements? I'm guessing it's somewhat less than the research fees of days gone by.
Like I said, the grant money is well deserved, but as the Getty press release and attaboy emails circulate around the interweb, I think it's important to keep what I've said in mind.
I don't care how many photo-festivals, awards or grants Getty funds. In my opinion, they will never make up for the huge amount of damage they've done to the photography industry.
Um, in my opinion.
