Phillip Jones Griffiths’s quote is correct…up to a point. The world isn’t being dumbed down. What’s happening is the mainstream media is being dumbed down. So its increasingly a mystery why so many photographers still have ambitions to work in it, because:
1/ It’s simply not interested in covering the issues these photographers profess to be interested in.
2/ It’s for the most part simply not interested in paying any significant sums for photojournalistic imagery.
3/ The audience is now hugely fragmented, but one thing is certain – most of the overall audience for news and journalism is increasingly abandoning mainstream media sources in favour of online options.
The SnapVillage thing and other ‘microstock’ houses are simply a symptom of a wider truth – that there are now a massive, overwhelming amount of images available. It’s supply and demand – if the supply increases, the price drops. Profit is made by having massive amounts of cheap images searchable under one portal.
This is a reality and cannot simply be wished away. The traditional photojournalistic paradigm is dead, and Corbis – being a business – is reacting to that.
What’s the point of having an Assignment Division, if the customers who traditionally provided the assignments no longer pay, or want the material?
I don’t like it anymore than anyone else, but its about time photographers woke up and stopped pursuing a target which no longer exists, and won’t profit you much even if it did. Magazine dayrates have hardly changed in over a decade, and they ain’t going up anytime soon.
All the signs have been pointing to this for ages, yet we’re stubbornly clinging to something thats gone, and trying to sustain a model which is no longer relevant in large part.
There was a thread on LS recently concerning magazines like Foto 8 and Private soliciting work for no payment. The counter-argument is that such magazines are the last bastion of quality long-form photojournalism.
But what struck me after reading the thread was that these magazines actually seem to work in a very similar way to Web 2.0 crowdsourcing companies. They’re a pole of attraction around which photographic content (not stock in this case but photo-essays) revolves, but they essentially provide little or no economic benefit to the creator.
They do of course benefit the brand value of the magazine, in the same way that iStockphoto becomes a brand – by simply showcasing work which builds its brand kudos across time, but doesn’t benefit the individual photographers in a major way.
These magazines are content aggregators and gatekeepers. One could even argue they’re worse gatekeepers than the traditional magazines. Traditional magazines chose what they were going to publish, and obviously rejected a lot of other stuff for all kinds of sensible or arbitrary reasons. But the chosen ones got paid.
Now, in what’s supposed to be a showcase for the best of our craft (mostly because other comparable showcases no longer exist), the photographer isn’t being paid, or is paid a small amount.
There really is little difference in the economic model of these magazines to other crowdsourcing trends, because they’re essentially a reaction to the reality of the photographic marketplace overall. The economic reality in photojournalism mirrors the reality of stock photography.
In stock photography you have now a huge number of people quite happy to give their images away or sell them for a pittance just for a photo-credit. The supply increases, the price falls. Its exactly the same in photojournalism.
Admit it.
So it’s a rich seam to be mined by content aggregators because that’s a workable business model to exploit that reality.
Of course it doesn’t work economically for the photographer…but as long as there are enough of you numpties out there willing to work for a photo-credit pat on the back and live off dog food (or are independently wealthy), those businesses will thrive.
The only thing which is going to sustain photojournalists is for them to start pursuing any and all other independent economic models in the online space. It’s the only place where you can (with effort obviously…want an easy life? Go work in a bank) find an audience which isn’t dumbed down, because the internet is where people SEEK OUT information, not where it’s spoonfed to them.
It’s also about the only place which is going to provide an economic backbone for photojournalism in future, simply because thats where increasing amounts of advertising money is going – away from print, to online. This is why so many newspapers and magazines are cutting budgets.
They have no advertising money to spend on sending you to Kaboomistan ‘to find yourself’ for 6 months anymore.
Get over it.
How is photojournalism going to be sustained in future? I have absolutely no idea.
What is obvious though is that any sustaining business model is going to have to start coming from US, and not the newspaper, magazine, stock library, agency, or any other gatekeeper crutch we might have relied upon in the past, because that whole infrastructure is being thrown up in the air…but for a bunch of people who are supposed to be in the business of seizing ‘the decisive moment’, we sure seem to be pretty bovine getting our shit together and adapting.
The situation we find ourselves in, is symptomatic of how far away most of us are from even grasping what’s going on, never mind doing anything about it.
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