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Stockschlock Revisited
Part I
By Dale O’Dell
In the May 17, 2006 issue of Photo Stock Notes, Rohn asked two interesting questions about stock photography: "Are we off on the wrong track?" and, "Would Cartier-Bresson be accepted today at Getty Images?" These are important questions to ask in today’s uncertain and commodity-driven stock image market.
No, we are not on the wrong track, but the big stock agencies are. Photographers are artists who take risks to create original works. This mindset is directly opposite of corporate culture that eschews risk and cannot recognize originality. To the big agencies "innovation" is to find out what’s successful and copy it. The agencies compel photographers to shoot what and how they want without realizing that if they let the photographers do what the photographers do best, the agencies would have more varied imagery to license.
Nobody gets into photography to shoot formulaic, banal pictures all the time (except for wedding photographers, but that’s a whole different market). The stock photography market is glutted with the lame, boring, "wishful imagery" Rohn wrote about. With so many of the big agencies funding wholly-owned shoots of "already acceptable" imagery, you’d be a fool to produce this stuff as a mere agency contributor. The agencies will promote their wholly-owned pictures over yours, and they’d probably reject yours anyway.
It seems the big agencies don’t get one fundamental fact: Picture buyers only buy what’s available to them. When agency editors (and who are the "editors" these days anyway, accountants?) reject imagery that doesn’t fit their preconceived notion of what it’s supposed to look like, nothing new or innovative gets into the market. The circle closes and creative artists are on the outside, victims of a bizarre sort of corporate economic censorship.
"Back in the day," agencies needed actual physical space to file film; it was understandable that offbeat and unique imagery might be rejected. After all, if it doesn’t sell, the file-space might be better used by images that do sell. But digital technology has changed all that. Now stock images are stored as binary code and take up no physical space. Sadly, these shortsighted and profit-only motivated suppliers of "content" won’t spare one megabyte for unique, unusual or interesting imagery. This anti-risk policy of rejecting photos that don’t fit a narrow, preconceived, corporate aesthetic, reduces the variety of imagery the picture-buyer has to choose from.
WHOSE TRACK IS IT ANYWAY?
A photographer is off on the wrong track if they’re not producing "their" pictures and exploring their own aesthetic. If a photographer is producing agencies’ pictures, they’re just rehashing the same old thing and adding to the already too high pile of sameness and banality.
Sadly, Henri Cartier-Bresson, despite his esteemed place in photographic art history, would receive a rejection letter from a stock agency today. The letter would tell him his work is unmarketable and he ought to study the agencies’ website to see what kind of imagery to copy. Thank goodness Mr. Cartier-Bresson never had any illusions of being a stock photographer. He made "his" images and we’ve all benefited from his vision. Can we say that about any stock photographer today?
Dale O’Dell is an independent stock photographer living in and producing in Prescott, AZ. dale@cybertrails.com <mailto:dale@cybertrails.com> http://www.dalephoto.com
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