Edit Agreement for Jolie Baby Photos?

The New York Times is reporting that People magazine paid more than cash for first rights to photos of Angelina Jolie's new set of twins. It has previously been reported that People paid $14 million for the photos of  Vivienne Marcheline and Knox Leon, the latest addition to the family of Jolie and husband Brad Pitt. But the Times says the contract also called for People to "offer coverage that would not reflect negatively on [Jolie] or her family."
    A spokesman for the magazine denied the claim.
    There are a lot of aspects to this story that bother me. If the claim by the Times is true, I would like to heartily condemn People for selling out its sense of journalistic authority. But I'm informed enough to know that this kind of agreement is nothing new. Promises get made. (Including them in contracts would be a new twist, however.) The bottom line is this: $14 million for baby pictures? This is out of control.

Time Inc. and Getty Revive Life Brand Again

Time Inc. announced today that it has partnered with Getty Images to jointly launch a new website called Life.com. The website will offer free, downloadable images from current and past photographers. It is scheduled to go live early in 2009.
         The images will be available only to consumers for non-commercial usage. In a press release, Time Inc. senior vice president Andy Blau promised that consumers would be able to "interact intimately" with the available imagery. Apparently that means printing photos for personal use, sharing photos with others, and "purchasing photo albums of user-made collections."
         The imagery will include Life's entire collection, including previously unseen images. That's cool. Getty will be contributing archived content as well as current imagery. The new site essentially represents Getty's effort to spread its business beyond  publishing and advertising and get into the consumer area. I'm not sure the Life reputation has much left to offer to the kinds of people who search the internet for imagery, but it probably won't hurt. --David Schonauer

Photoshelter Collection Comes to a Close

We received sad news a bit ago that the Photoshelter Collection is shutting down, effective October 10. Started only a year ago, the Collection's big idea was to use technology to make a user-friendly upload system that would allow photographers who don't exclusively shoot stock to get into the stock game. I was impressed by their new ideas and enthusiasm, as were many photographers and editors, obviously. But as CEO Allen Murabayashi explained in a characteristically honest post to the Photoshelter blog, the odds were stacked way too high against them. They underestimated the extreme complexity of licensing images, as well as the complete hegemony that Getty exercises. And despite hearing from image buyers that they were desperately looking for better, original images, as we heard at the Photoshelter Shoot The Day! symposium a few months ago, those buyers rarely actually purchased Photoshelter images. Allen's blog post has drawn many frowny emoticons and, unsurprisingly, several indignant comments from photographers who feel they wasted their time uploading to the Collection and are disappointed to see it close after only a year. I have to say I'm surprised to see the Collection fold so quickly, but if it wasn't making enough money, in an economy like this especially, I understand the decision to cut their loses. The FAQ page here has more answers for photographers affected by this decision.
~Miki Johnson

Perpignan Friday: Getty awards, parties, and an emotional anniversary slide show

After the inspiring but heart-wrenching conflict-photographers symposium Friday morning, Getty presented slideshows of its five grantees for editorial photography this year. I have mentioned the most recent three before -- David Gillanders, Lynsey Addario, and Eugene Richards -- and I was already pretty familiar with their work. The two earlier grantees I wasn't familiar with, but very impressed by. Ian Martin's biography reads like many photojournalists: after early awards for his work, he started a wedding photography business to actually support himself and his family. The project that won the Getty grant, on South Africa's poor white communities, marks his re-entry to the photojournalism world. Although Richards' film and photography series War Is Personal was the one that really brought tears to my eyes, Lorena Ros's portraits of adults who were sexually abused as children certainly softened me up (see above). The simple portraits are paired with images of the spaces where the abuse took place or spaces that triggered those memories, and both will eventually be joined by archival images of the victims at the time of the abuse as well as audio interviews about their experiences. Jean-Jacques seemed unimpressed, complaining that we lack information about who the abusers were or what these people have gone through -- but to me this is precisely why the project is so powerful. It's not the abusers we should focus on, as the news media too often has, but the victims whose lives have been irrevocably scarred by the abuse. It's also important just to see these people and recognize that they look just like anyone else -- considering that one in four girls and one in seven boys are sexually abused before they reach the age of 17, they undoubtedly look just like someone you know.

The Getty Sale: Surprises and Predictions

I haven’t talked to anyone who works at Getty Images yet about the official sale of the company, so I don’t know if people there are happy or not about the situation. One group who should feel happy, though, is Getty shareholders. The sales price of $2.4 billion is hefty.  I’m not the only person who was surprised that the private equity firm of Hellman & Friednman paid that much. There is no denying the downward pressure on the prices that Getty can charge for imagery. (For a very interesting read on how digital technology puts downward pressure on the pricing of everything, go here.) After earlier reports that there were no buyers willing to step up,  I thought the company might end up being sold off in pieces. Shows you what I know.
       I’m also surprised that Getty honchos Jonathan Klein (above) and Mark Getty are staying on with the company. I thought new management would be the order of the day. In any case, Klein and Getty will be facing a new world now, according to Barbara Coffey, vice president of equity research at Kaufman Bros.
       “What will be most interesting is to see what changes occur after the company goes private,” Coffey says. “Jon and Mark will no longer be under the microscope that being public requires. But at many levels being private will place even more pressure on the business. While the public market is focused on quarter-by-quarter results, the private market is less so. But it is much more focused on overall returns, which may be hard for these guys if the market stays as chaotic as it has been lately.” So we’ll wait and see.—David Schonauer

It's Official: Getty Images Sold to Private Equity Firm

After a decade of acquiring nearly every stock photography collection and agency with promise, Getty Images has itself been acquired. The buyer? Private equity firm Hellman & Friedman LLC, in a transaction valued at approximately $2.4 billion.

Starting just over a decade ago, the imaging company built with money from oil baron Mark Getty set about transforming a sleepy, largely mom-and-pop industry built on analog slide shipments into the leading digital photo library in the Internet age. Over the years the company's work impacted nearly ever professional photographer in the business, and, as is the case with most disruptive businesses, engendered more than its share of criticism.

Still, the company's power and success are undeniable, as evidenced by today's heft price tag.

What's next? How will the purchase, if approved, impact photographers working today? Stay tuned as this all shakes out, and please share your thoughts in the comments below. Also, if you're at all interested in the history of how Getty got to where it is today, see our analysis of its acquisition history.

Full press release after the jump.

A History of Getty Images' Acquisitions

With news of Getty Images' acquisition by private equity firm Hellman & Friedman, we thought we'd share this list, compiled by research firm Ketupa.net and analyzed by yours truly, to show how Getty became the prime mover in the photo industry. Full list of Getty's acquisitions, and prices when available, after the jump.

A Wrap-Up on Photo News

I vowed to avoid work over the longish weekend and forbid myself from posting. But the news of photography and our modern culture piled up. Here is a short, slanted wrap-up:

LINDSAY LOHAN POSES AS MARILYN
I really wanted to say something about this when I saw the images in New York magazine yesterday, but wisely held back. This was a promotional ploy, and it worked—lots of publicity all over TV and the web. But photographically it caused me to wince, and I don’t wince easily. Bert Stern, who famously photographed the “last sitting” of the real Marilyn, took the new photos, but he did Lohan no favors. She looks like a transvestite in that blond wig. She also looks about 10 times more haggard than the real Marilyn did when Stern shot the originals—and that was only a few weeks before Marilyn committed suicide. Above all, the new photos remind us that Marilyn was simply transcendent in photographs. She made pictures better just by being in them. Sometimes photographers have to put their egos on the shelf and admit that it’s the person in the image that makes a picture great.

THE PRICE IS RIGHT: MICROSTOCK FOR $7
Photo District News reports on the on-going effort by microstock agencies to find the optimum price for royalty-free photographs. According to Adam Brotman, senior vice-president of SnapVillage, that price is $7. SnapVillage, owned by Corbis, lets photographers assign prices to their images, and, as Brotman notes, the average price paid for images is $7. The news could be worse, since SnapVillage allows such images to be prices at $1, $5, $10, $25, or $50.

BABY PHOTOS EARN BIG MONEY
But photographers probably don’t see much of it. AdAge.com reports that People magazine is prepared to pay Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony between $4 million and $6 million dollars for exclusive U.S. rights to the first photos of their expected twins. People also reported paid $1.5 million for the first pictures of Christina Aguilera’s new baby. The magazine was rumored to have paid $4 million for pictures of baby Shiloh Jolie-Pitt. According to AdAge, those images drove up sale 45 percent. However, the issue with the first shots of Britney Spears’s son Sean Preston saw a decline in sales of 15 percent. Anyway, being a good baby photographer might be a good business—better, at least, than microstock.

MONKEY PARENTING IS ALWAYS GOOD, PHOTOGRAPHICALLY
With all this otherwise negative news, I’ve got to end on something photographically worthwhile. Below you see one of pictures of the week from nationalgeographic.com. It shows Vale, a four-week-old titi monkey held by his father, Thiago, in London zoo’s new rainforest habitat. Beautifully framed, the photo was made by Peter Macdiarmid for Getty Images.--David Schonauer

Getty Images For Sale

The New York Times reports today that Getty Images has put itself up for sale. The newspaper quotes insiders as saying the company could be worth more than $1.5 billion.

Getty has hired the investment banking firm of Goldman Sachs to work on the sale. Among the potential buyers are private equity firms such as Kohlberg Kravis Roberts. Final bids are due at the end of January.

After more than a decade of growth, largely due to acquisitions, Getty has hit a rough patch of late. The company’s shares have decreased in value more than 47 percent in the last year. In August, Getty lost 10 percent of its market value after lowering its full-year profit estimate. That same month, the company laid off 100 employees. In November, it reported a third-quarter profit of $25.7 billion million, down 31 percent from the previous year.

The cause for these declines is competition from micro stock and royalty-free agencies, which sell imagery at low prices. Getty was forced to lower prices on its own imagery, cutting into profits.

There’s a wonderful quote in the Times story from Barbara Coffey, a Kaufman Brothers stock analyst. Last year Coffey advised selling Getty stock, though she recently raised her recommendation to hold after the company’s stock price fell to $24.

“Getty Images continues to be a company in transition, adjusting from being the leading player in an oligopolistic market to being one of many players in a highly competitive market,” said Coffey.

It’s not just the photo market that’s in transition, of course, but the entire field of photography. Getty grew first because it had the capital to buy smaller agencies and digitize their content, and later because it pioneered selling content on the Internet. Now technology has made it possible for many smaller agencies to sell imagery on the Web.

For photographers, all this has been a mixed blessing. The Internet has created sales possibilities for large numbers of shooters in places all around the globe—and in that sense it has been a democratizing force. At the same time, as the price of imagery has been continually driven lower by competition, professional photographers have seen their incomes drop.

The Getty sale may mark a turning point, as the idea of professional photography itself is being redefined. As I’ve noted before, technology has blurred the boundaries between professional and amateur photography.

--David Schonauer

Documenting Wildfires

Five top photojournalists based in Southern California are organizing a presentation of their images from the recent wildfires there. Chris Carlson (AP), Wally Skalij (Los Angeles Times), Nelvin Cepeda (The San Diego Union-Tribune), Hayne Palmouor (North County Times), and Sandy Huffaker (Getty) will present their work, with Howard Lipin (staff photographer for The San Diego Union-Tribune and co-host of PhotoTalkRadio.com) moderating. The event will be held at the the Museum of Photographic Arts--Balboa on December 16 from 3-5. Donations of $5 will benefit the After-the-Fires Fund 2007.

~Miki Johnson

(Photo: "A CDF firefighter runs for his safety as fire flares up the Mt. Palomar mountain." © Wally Skalij)