Non-Profit Photo Agency Idea

panos is the only one that comes to mind – half of their profits go to fund humanitarian projects.

http://www.panos.co.uk/

Check out GlobalAware

They had a similar idea, but I can’t say anything good about them. I had a bunch of images with them, found out through web searches that they had sold a couple, and was never able to get paid. I’ve been trying to get them to remove my images from their archives for months. They stopped answering my emails altogether.

I’d be curious to hear how you think “being able to photograph for a living” and “non-profit” could go together?

I’ve heard about this italian agency that was born as a non profit agency to document the activities of NGOs’ worldwide. I don’t know anything about them but you can check their website:
http://www.photoaid.eu/uk.htm
best,
s.

Check out Impact Visuals- founded on a similar platform- survived for a tumultuous and rocky 15 years from around 1985 – 2001… and the late eighties was still a time of deep pockets for well funded photo stories.

The thought was to go a different direction than a group like GlobalAware. I was thinking that charities would subscribe to the group by paying a monthly or yearly subscription fee. Those fees, along donations, etc., would then pay for photographers to shoot specifically what the charities are looking for. The collections of photos would still be copyrighted to the photographer, but the agency and the subscribing charities would get limited rights to use the photos for their organizations. Beyond that, any donated images not from assignments, would be a tax deductible.

Just thinking out loud

In my opinion, that sounds like the beginnings of a great idea, especially for freelancers looking for a global sort of association. Sounds like it could be an interesting collective to be a part of as well. If you go further on developing this, I would definitely want to try and be a part. Good luck on the search though.

-phil

I’m hoping to work on a few projects for this outfit in the near future: http://www.genesisphotos.com/index.php

It’s a great idea, but it’s hard to see how there is a large enough market for NGO-driven photography to sustain an agency devoted to it, and charities will balk at paying a retainer when they can buy photos a la carte from the big agencies.

And what would the new agency offer a charity that a traditional agency doesn’t, besides a price break (aren’t photos cheap enough now anyway)? Just thinking out loud, too.

At the end of the day, stock photography is cheap enough for any NGO to afford it, but what most organizations really need is stuff specific to them and their mission—their own personnel looking serious at a microphone somewhere, the director of a field office giving a bednet to a woman in a malarial zone, the org’s major donor receiving an award, etc. For much of this stuff, they just pay an event photographer.

An NGOs media needs are very internal and inward looking—annual reports, donor-recognition documents, communications with stakeholders and potential donors, etc. It would be hard to conceive of a single agency that could serve the needs of more than one NGO at a time. And the big agencies do this already for the NGOs that can afford it.

I understand what you are saying Preston. I was noticing that many charities overlap each other’s locations and goals. If 10 charities, all of which do work in the Dominican Republic, for example, this loose collective could be a place they could all get imagery.

Also, the idea isn’t to give them a price break, but to give limited rights to the images to the subscribing organizations for free, for as long as they subscribe. The photographers get their projects funded through the photo collective via the subscriptions. The photographers keep the rights to the images to resell or reuse as they want.