A photo agency is a business that represents and contracts independent photographers in supplying news outlets and print and screen publications. They are agents for the photographer. Increasingly in the twenty-first century, with the proliferation of digitisation and of imagery from digital devices, aside from their main business, photo agencies may also provide stock images from their library for commercial use.
Roles
The agency
The photo agency may be managed by a company or a photographers' cooperative "to handle the business end of photography, often around particular kinds of images, such as news and documentary photography. Agencies recruit clients, assign photographers when a client contacts the agency, pay the bills, and handle contracts."
The photographer The traditional photo agency assigns freelance photographers, often called 'stringers', to projects and custom photoshoots, and licenses their images to clients. They are not salaried, but paid per content, and the amount and type of work is typically at their discretion. They may have an ongoing relationship with one or more agency, to which they provide content on particular topics or locations when the opportunities arise. They may specialise in news, documentary, commercial, industrial fashion, and editorial work. Their agency assigns photographers to projects based on client needs, providing them exclusive, original content.
As noted by Blair: "photo agency photographers worked differently from newspaper and wire service photographers, and their responsibilities were also different from magazine staffers." Rather than a news event itself, they may focus on its longer–term context and consequences.
From the contact printing of glass plates to digital images, photography has evolved under the imperatives of ease, efficiency and economics to which the photo agencies have had to adapt, but also as a step within a production line of journalists, laboratory technicians, writers of captions and texts, the sales department, distributors, sales representatives and finally the archiving department.
The wirephoto, the scanning and transmission of photographs through the telephone network, first used in France, became dominant in photo distribution for newspapers, accelerating the expansion of these services. Electronic means such as the Laserphoto system superseded the wirephoto in the 1970s, and by 1989 full-colour images could be transmitted, leading, beside improvements in the economics of offset colour printing achieved in the 1980s, to the more common use in newspapers, of colour photography which had, since the 1930s, been the preserve of magazines and newspaper supplements.
Denoyelle denotes the photo agency as "artisanal", so subject to technological developments, but fundamentally unchanging in structure until the 1980s and 1990s. The director sets the editorial line, the recruitment of new photographers or their departure, as well as technical choices, the organisation of work, and the securing of sales internationally. The agency's name and reputation, as a brand affixed to each photograph, determines the level of remuneration, and is given credit in publications, and while photographers' agencies might request that the photographer's name be added, it is the client publications' last consideration.
Almost always dependent on the agency and its sales agents, the photographer's legal status is subject to proceedings that are not necessarily favourable. In the first instance, copyright belongs to with the originator of the image, the photographer. However, there are variations between jurisdictions, with significant differences between say, the US, and Australia. In the latter, registration for copyright is not required even for legal purposes, and the default for commercial photos is often that the photographer retains copyright unless assigned by contract, while US photo agencies frequently use contracts to automatically acquire all rights as "work-for-hire." Thus rights may be signed over to the agency as part of the contract, especially where clients desire exclusive rights to the content.
While serving the demand for images, the creation of some of these agencies as cooperatives in turn allows photographers to group together to better manage their work and especially their dissemination. As the author of their photographs they decide on the changes to be made to their photographs, whether it is a cropping for a publication in the press or other. In addition, these agencies, whose photographers themselves choose the new members, will later become real schools of photographers, Magnum being the classic example.
Stock photography Persky notes a "blurred line between the terms 'picture agency' and 'stock agency'". The primary distinctions between a photo agency and a stock photo agency, picture agency, photo library or image bank, are the origins and originality of the images and the intent of the service. In essence, a photographic agency supports living independent photographers in commissioning, promoting, selling and distributing work. A stock photo agency sells individual or sets of photographs acquired from photographers living, dead or anonymous. That is, a photo agency typically focuses on commissioning or representing photographers for specific assignments, while a stock photo agency licenses pre–existing images in a business with origins in the commercial sales of carte-de-visite, postcard and stereo views of the mid nineteenth century.
The distribution of stock photographs covered by copyright is done against remuneration, either by piece, flat rate, or by subscription and is based on a catalogue of photographic archives of themed keyword-searchable databases. From a massive stock or "marketplace" of pre–shot, existing images, buyers may choose digital photographs or prints licensed for commercial or editorial use. Searchable databases enable quick selection of affordable imagery, which is usually non–exclusive. The disadvantage is their often "generic" quality.
Traditional photo agencies would assign new photographs of a subject, while stock photography companies would sell existing images. However, some photo stock agencies, such as Getty Images, Shutterstock, Adobe Stock, are taking on some of the roles of a photo agency, such as contracting photographers to produce photographs.
History
Most magazine and newspaper photographers were directly employed by their publications, but increasing demand created by the development of the halftone printing process was the opening for the business of the photo agency in the late 19th century and the early 20th century. World War I was a catalyst, with agencies sending imagery of the European theatre of war to anxious and distant audiences.
In an early instance, American photographer George Bain left St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1898 to create his Bain News Service, and that was followed by Underwood & Underwood, Keystone View Company and Culver Pictures in 1901, United Newspictures (later Acme) and International News Photos in 1915, The New York Times offshoot Wide World Photos in 1919, and the Associated Press Photos subsidiary in 1927.
In England, a supplement to The Illustrated London News in 1928 noted that: Few people turning over the pages of "The Illustrated London News", or any of its colleagues in "the Great Eight," [The Illustrated London News, The Sketch; The Graphic, Bystander; The Sphere, Tatler and Eve; and the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News] can form an adequate idea of the labour involved in the production of a single number...Among the photographic agencies of London from whom a not inconsiderable part of the illustrations which appear in the "Great Eight" are drawn are the Topical Press, the Central News, and the Central Press, whose organisations are controlled by a refinement of system which enables them to transform into order what, without system, would be chaos...
In France, the Rol agency was founded in 1904, and Meurisse in 1909 serving periodicals illustrated mainly by reproductions of photographs including daily newspapers such as like Excelsior, founded in Paris in 1910.
In Germany, before the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, the Reich Association of German Press (Reichsverband der Deutschen Presse or RDP), established in 1910, functioned as a traditional, voluntary trade union and professional guild for journalists and the emerging profession of photojournalist.
During this pre-Nazi period, photojournalism boomed in mass-circulation, heavily illustrated magazines which pioneered modern photo-essays as a means to convey news amongst which were the Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung or AIZ (The Workers Pictorial Newspaper), Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung and the Münchner Illustrierte Presse. Otto Umbehr (Umbo) with Simon Buttmann founded the photo agency Dephot (Deutscher Photodienst GmbH) in 1928 of which Schlegel notes its specialties dance, vaudeville, theatre, and cinema, and its contributions to AIZ, published by Willi Münzenberg, famous for his savvy and pioneering use of photography, and who encouraged candid photographs taken with the new smaller cameras.
Produced between 1924 and March 1933 in Berlin, AIZ achieved a peak circulation of 500,000, then with the rise of Nazism, it relocated to Prague and finally Paris until 1938. Anti-Fascist and pro-communist in stance, it is best remembered for the contributions of Münzenberg's worker-photography agency Vereinigung der Arbeiter-Fotografen (Association of Worker Photographers) in its pages, and the propagandistic photomontages of John Heartfield which appeared weekly on its covers. Its contributors included the agency photographers of Dephot and pioneering photojournalists Wolfgang Weber (who joined Ullstein Verlag), Max Alpert, Edith Tudor-Hart, Janos Reismann, Tina Modotti, Walter Reuter, Walter Ballhause, and Avraham Pisarek.
Consolidation By the early 1930s, the proliferation of news and leisure magazines covering sports, radio, travel, fashion, and more, along with the opening of new distribution channels, fostered the emergence of numerous talents. In Paris for example, illustrated newspapers rose in numbers from 60 in 1928 to 82 in 1933, and periodicals from 575 to 654. In the mid-1930s the growth in photo-based weekly and monthly magazines was boosted with improving camera technology and film sensitivity. Photo agencies began to appear that combined current news photos with the provision of an archive service drawing from their back catalogue, in what were known as 'picture libraries'; one of the first being Black Star. But agencies are not the only ones marketing photographs; newspapers that have their own team of photographers resell or exchange photos with other publications and agencies after using them in their articles.
Paris was the capital of photographic press agencies: telegraph (wirephoto) agencies (AFP, Reuters, UPI, AP, etc.); and "magazine" agencies, such as Dalmas, the APIS agency, the Associated Reporters agency. For convenience, magazine proprietors of many nations, German, American, Brazilian, Spanish opened offices in Paris. The Magnum agency in 1947 was founded by photojournalists Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Maria Eisner, George Rodger, David Seymour and Rita Vandivert to distribute their photographs and to protect their copyright. Based in Paris and soon in New York they expanded to offices in London and Tokyo. As a cooperative venture photographers pursued their own projects and they, not the agency nor the publications, retained copyright to their photos. Other such cooperatives were Black Star, the Gamma agency established by Hubert Henrotte, Hughes Vassal, and Raymond Depardon in 1966, Sipa Press (1973) and the Sygma agency, also created in 1973.
State-run agencies