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

Sign On, Meet Up, Shoot Away

Seattle-based photographer Chase Jarvis has long been a champion of amateur/emerging photographers, especially insofar as professionals are trying to shut them out of the industry because they feel threatened. The black box -- what Jarvis calls that core of insider knowledge pros can get overly protective of -- needs to have the top blown off, he says. Jarvis has been doing this on a personal level by posting detailed explanations on his blog of how he gets his shots, how he packs his bags, even every outtake photo from an entire shoot (the pros take crappy pictures too!). Now he's stepping it up to the next level by helping the Seattle amateur photo community, collected in a Flickr Meetup and Strobist group, to come together for big photo learning sessions. They just had their second shoot day, with 100 photographers and lots of models, lights, and, yes, professionals congregating in a HUGE studio space Jarvis helped procure. Check out the video here and the longer background description from the first shoot here. Although most communities will be hard-pressed to find a professional steward who "gets it" as quickly and completely as Jarvis, this is an idea and ideology that Jarvis (and I) hope to see proliferate around the country and globe.

~Miki Johnson

Three Glimpses of Photography's Future

By now I'm guessing that most people who read blogs (or email) have read Vincent Laforet's insightful, tough-love opus at Sports Shooter about the state of photography today (and tomorrow), The Cloud is Falling. It's a long piece, so there's a chance you might not have gotten to this late paragraph:

I'll leave you with this. If I were 22-years old right out of college looking for a job or a career path, I wouldn't be focusing on working on x newspaper to get to y newspaper and then eventually z magazine with my 20 image portfolio that contains 2 spot news photos, 4 sports pix, 4 feature photos, and a 10 picture story. That model is dead - to put it bluntly. I'd be thinking big - realizing that I have a chance to be a pioneer in this new world of opportunity. Trying to think up of the next big thing.

Woohoo Vincent. You tell 'em. I've been saying this for years, especially because many of the photographers I'm frequently in contact with are, to varying degrees, just out of college, and I know they have the talent to get this revolution off on the right foot. Anyway, it's nice to have that idea reiterated by one of today's biggest photojournalists, especially when he supports it with so much first-hand evidence.

This whole thing has gotten me thinking about what this "new world" might look like, and I've found a couple of promising things (see below). To my mind, the faster we recognize and assimilate the good ideas, the faster we can move on to the even better ones.

PhotoShelter Town Hall: New Stock and Old Arguments

PhotoShelter's new "town hall" series, which premiered in New York September 14, is ostensibly designed to bring together photographers and art buyers to talk about where the industry is headed, especially as it applies to the online realm. But we all know that it's also a convenient forum for them to introduce their new photographer-friendly stock agency (full exclusive report at popphoto.com), the PhotoShelter Collection.

And it certainly didn't hurt their cause to include in the "roundtable" discussion Roy Hsu, a photographer and president of the Stock Artists Alliance, which is leading the charge against Getty's announcement a few weeks ago that it would offer $49 "web use" licenses for images from all of its collections, including its top tier Rights Managed images. A number of photographers' organizations have joined the effort to have Getty rescind the offer, including ASMP, APA, EP, and U.K. and Canadian groups.

What started off with PhotoShelter CEO and founder Allen Murabayashi gently prodding Getty and Corbis employees in the audience with "we know you're out there," ended up as a full-blown airing of grievances against Getty. Photographer Kareem Black, who was also on the panel, has been represented by Getty for years and said he has watched his checks "go down over the years." "They believe in quantity rather than quality," he complained. "Someone's making money, but the photographers aren't."

San Fran Power Outage Causes TypePad Hiccups

The State of the Art blog was down briefly this afternoon due to the power outage in San Francisco. The blogging software we and thousands of other bloggers use, TypePad, comes from a San Francisco company called Six Apart. The affected area, caled SOMA for South of Market, happens to be at the epicenter of American Internet commerce, and where companies such as Craigslist, Yelp and others call home. Incidentally, just last week New York had a similar explosion, caused by rainwater hitting a steam pipe, that could cost area businesses millions of dollars. In any event, if you have trouble commenting just ping me at editor@popphoto.com.

--Jay DeFoore

The Cream Will Rise

So I've been meaning to post for a couple days now, since attending the Magnum @ 60 seminar on Saturday at the New York Public Library, part of Magnum's 60th anniversary festival. The panel discussion was a pleasure, as it put in conversation four of the agency's best respected and most eloquent photographers--Susan Meiselas, Larry Towell, Gilles Peress, and Phillip Jones Griffiths--along with documentary film maker Keith Beauchamps who valiantly held his own as the lone panelist who was younger than 40, not white, not a photographer, and not a member of Magnum. It was so enjoyable to hear them debate because, although they tackled topics that have been thoroughly hashed over on every photography forum--the photographer's responsibility, the malleability of digital images, the changing role of agencies--they tackled them with the combined knowledge of a century of image taking and nearly that much time sitting around discussing exactly these points with other photographers.

The thing that finally drove me to write, though, was something that Magnum photographer David Alan Harvey said at tonight's Magnum Festival event, Drinks with Magnum at The Half King in Chelsea. It's all about authorship, was Harvey's easily put but infrequently achieved advice. "You have to have something to say." And that got me thinking, again, about Larry Towell's complaint that during the open portfolio reviews Magnum held last weekend, he saw way too many photographers who didn't know how to tell a story. "There was no thread, no consistency, and very little purpose," was his assessment...much like the "avalanche of images" that the Magnum photographers also complained about. The AP, Towell told the audience, sent NO photographers to the affected areas when the tsunami hit Indonesia. Instead, it handed out digital cameras to people on the ground (if anyone can verify this, I'd love to know more about it). "There were lots of pictures," he said. "But I don't remember any of them."

Magnum Launches Group Blog

Magnum Photos is the newest photo agency to join the blog party. The 60-year-old collective launched a group blog earlier this month under the management of Ann Tornkvist, a political science graduate of the University of Glasgow.

We're looking forward to getting to know the Magnum photographers better, some of whom in person can seem to have egos to match their outsized photojournalist scarves.

The 2006 EPUK Golden Sureshot Awards

The snarky snappers over at EPUK have contributed one of the funniest and most accurate wrap-ups yet of the year in photography that was 2006.

The 2006 EPUK Golden Sureshot Awards skewer everyone from Digital Railroad for delaying its long-promised marketplace functionality to Getty Images for legitimizing the move towards amateur photogrpahy. Even our very own Hachette gets spanked for its mishandling and eventual sell-off of its storied photo properties.

Full list here.

--Jay DeFoore

Q&A With StockPhotoTalk Blogger Andy Goetze

As promised earlier, he's the expanded Q&A with Andy Goetze, proprietor of StockPhotoTalk, the first and likely best known blog to cover the wild wild stock photography industry.

For more from this series of American Photo's Innovators of 2006, go here.

-Jay DeFoore

Q&A With Dennis Dunleavy

The Jan/Feb issue of American Photo has a big feature on the "innovators who are changing the art and business of photography." In contributing the piece on the most innovative photo bloggers, I purposely left off the photographers who blog, like Alec Soth and Chase Jarvis (more on them later), and the zillions of people who post pictures to "photo blogs." My idea was to focus on the handful of bloggers who are reshaping how we write about and think about both the art and the business of photography. The list was a bit arbitrary (Lightstalkers is not really a blog, but has some of the characteristics of one), and undoubtedly left off many we would have liked to have covered.

But the list was a diverse sampling of some of the leading thought leaders. In the spirit of blogging and the transparency it fosters, I am running the complete Q&A I had with Dennis Dunleavy, Joerg Colberg, and Andy Goetze in this space, starting with Dunleavy, author of The Big Picture. Ironically for print you have to edit down, but as most writers will tell you there's always more they hoped they could get into the story. I hope the following will help to give these guys their due.

See the complete Q&A with Dennis Dunleavy after the jump.

-Jay DeFoore