A New Dawn For Photojournalism
If cameras had never been invented, history, events, and remembrances would be relegated to the medieval methods of disseminating information: drawings, statuary, tapestry, and hearsay.
In the 40's and 50's, the glory days of freelance photo journalism, brilliant photographers captured and interpreted the world around them. The results got published in the popular magazines and periodicals of the day. Photojournalists were a collective Oprah to the masses.
Eventually, television's nightly news took over as consumers chose that medium to get their interpretations of daily happenings. Freelance photojournalism in the 70's and 80's, if it existed at all, was superseded by paparazzi, TV cameramen, or staff photographers at major newspapers.
Only an occasional resurfacing of freelance photojournalism appeared when photographers like Rick Smolan began publishing his Day In The Life Series, inviting photographers to document a single subject over a 24-hour period. Otherwise, the freelance photojournalist has faded from the publishing scene.
In the 90's, marketers have discovered that nostalgia and history are profitable. As the massive numbers of Baby Boomers arrive at middle age, early photos of Elvis, the Beatles, Chicago and Watts demonstrations, Marilyn, Vietnam, have become marketable. TV documentaries about WWII, or the Civil Rights movement, or the Ken Burns Series on baseball, demonstrated that still photos that had been relegated to the attic trunk are now again valuable. Veteran Photojournalists are scrambling to their dusty archives to catalog photos they thought were forgotten and useless.
A new awareness of the value of archived photos has emerged. We are experiencing a new dawn of photojournalism. Not contemporary photojournalism (that's effectively taken care of by television crews, thank you), but photojournalism of bygone days.
What we once thought were photos that had lived their lives and were now ready for cremation are now emerging as valuable assets to both photographers and publishers, who have realized that the WWW (World Wide Web) can be used as a tool to easily search out obscure collections of documentary photos hiding in nooks and crannies across the USA.
The new kid on the block, the commercial stock photo industry has correctly realized that the Web is an important vehicle for disseminating information about collections of generic photos that can be used for multiple purposes in advertising, promotion, education, and human interest.
Now the photojournalism world, having been in a cocoon for twenty years, is just beginning to realize that the Web offers a superb opportunity to broadcast the whereabouts of millions of photojournalistic pictures that can now be called "editorial stock photos." I estimate the total of such photos to be about 325 million.
It was Bill Gates of Corbis, who originally gave commercial credence to the notion that we ought to preserve and commercialize on these historical photos, when he originally founded his "CONTINUUM" (which has now emerged as "Corbis Images") back in 1989. Their purpose was to find, catalog, and
Under the leadership of acquisitions manager, Charles Mauzy (now departed from Corbis), Gates has acquired impressive numbers of important photojournalistic images. His mission got temporarily sidetracked in 1997 when the bean counters at Corbis Corporation convinced him that just collecting nostalgic photos had no short term profit, and they've catapulted themselves onto the gold brick road of RF ("Royalty Free") photos. Although RF photos won't bring high prices at a Sothbey auction or be featured in a traveling exhibit, they will undoubtedly help pay salaries at Corbis.
As I wrote in PhotoStockNotes back in September '94, Gates' vision is not unlike the mission of the great Library of Alexandria in North Africa (7th century A.D.), where Hellenistic scholars could benefit from the accumulated knowledge of the time. Despite Corbis Corporation's current romance with RF images, Gates original mission for Corbis will no doubt prevail. If it does, like a jumbo NFL offensive lineman, he will pull out and lead interference for you as we move into a new age of New Media that will recognize the commercial benefits and vitality of historical photos.
Rohn Engh is director of PhotoSource International and publisher of PhotoStockNotes.
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