Lament for a Dying Field: Photojournalism
August 10th, 2009Wow. I’ve made some boneheaded decisions in my life, but the decision to not stick with photojournalism wasn’t one of them.
When I was involved in the 1990s, it seemed grim, in terms of income. It’s obviously much worse now.
To those of you who are making it work, I salute you.
To those of you who do it because you can’t help it… I know. I’ve been there.
Via: New York Times:
When photojournalists and their admirers gather in southern France at the end of August for Visa pour l’Image, the annual celebration of their craft, many practitioners may well be wondering how much longer they can scrape by.
Newspapers and magazines are cutting back sharply on picture budgets or going out of business altogether, and television stations have cut back on news coverage in favor of less-costly fare. Pictures and video snapped by amateurs on cellphones are posted to Web sites minutes after events have occurred. Photographers trying to make a living from shooting the news call it a crisis.
In the latest sign of distress, the company that owns the photo agency Gamma sought protection from creditors on July 28 after a loss of €3 million, or $4.2 million, in the first half of the year as sales fell by nearly a third.
Gamma was founded in 1966 by the photographers Raymond Depardon and Gilles Caron. With Sygma, Sipa and, earlier, Magnum, it was one of the independent agencies that helped make Paris a world capital for photojournalism, attracting some of the best photographers the field has produced.
A Paris commercial court gave Gamma’s owner, Eyedea Presse, six months to reorganize itself. The company employs 56 people in its Paris headquarters, 14 of them photographers.
Olivia Riant, a spokeswoman for Eyedea, said there would “inevitably” be job cuts to make the agency viable.
“The business model is not working today,” she said. “So without some changes, it won’t work tomorrow.”
“The problem is that news photography is finished,” Ms. Riant said. “Gamma wants to go back to magazines and newsmagazines. We will stop covering daily news events to more deeply cover issues.”
…
“Photojournalism means the photographers can tell the story themselves in pictures, and there were places where they could publish those photos,” Mr. Klein said. “In the print world, many, if not most, of those places have since disappeared.”
Still, he said, there are reasons to be optimistic, because “thanks to the Web, there are now billions of pages for photographers to show their work,” he added. “That’s led to more photos being used, but at a lower price point.”
Jean-François Leroy, organizer of the Visa pour l’Image photojournalism festival, which runs in Perpignan for two weeks beginning Aug. 29, pointed to a declining emphasis in the media on serious subjects — what he called the “disease of the press” — as another problem.
“Photographers are producing plenty of great stuff, but now the media seem interested only in celebrities,” he said. When Michael Jackson died, it wasn’t part of the news, it was the news. How many photographs of his funeral did we really need?”
Mr. Leroy said he would advise budding photojournalists to think very carefully about their commitment to the calling. Twenty years ago, a photojournalist made enough money to live on, he said. “I’m not pretending you would get rich, but you were able to live decently,” he said. “That is not the case now.”
Trillions of dollars to kill and destroy, yet no money to produce informative, well-crafted images?
Tell me another.
Just more evidence of systematic de-funding of anything that could actually benefit the public in the name of private profits.
This sort of thing could eventually lead to a resurgence of New Deal style welfare for artists.