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The New Age of Social Photography
Advance Notes: There is a trend toward "realness" brewing in the stock photography world. It's sometimes called "social photography." But don't pin your hopes on it. The public is finicky. The pendulum may swing back to make-believe photos.
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In 1987, I can remember talking with a California stock photo agency director who waved his hand toward his office files with the exclamation, "Editorial photos? We have plenty of those!" The pictures he referred to, of course, were clean-cut models in a simulated work situation smiling at a computer screen, or an immaculate housewife pleasantly choring away with her modern vacuum cleaner. The viewing public in those days, it was assumed, preferred fairytale "editorial" pictures.
Catalogs of historical B&W photos from the postwar era also reflect the aspirations of the public (or at least that's what the art directors figured), depicting a peaches-and-cream wonderland society, that, however, few people ever actually experienced.
Times have changed. Perhaps the shock of 9/11, or the turmoil in the Middle East, or the surge of social channels on TV, have all contributed to today's portrayal of reality as it really is. The public is growing up and getting real. Publishers are wakening up also. We are seeing a growing willingness of publishers to tackle controversial social subjects with natural lighting and hand-held camerawork. Even major Hollywood films today reflect a cultural acceptance of the "real."
Yes, the squeaky-clean advertising pictures we continue to see today have their place - in advertising. Magazine and book publishers, however, have shifted to a sense of realism in the images they choose for production. They perceive that their readership wants the "straight story."
THE OSCARS
The nominations for "The Oscars" back in 2006 also reflect this willingness to tackle gritty, topical issues head on. The top nominations ranged from race relations ("Crash") to the death penalty ("Capote"). In fact all four major nominees dealt with realism and the personal cost of making life decisions based on whether to conform to social norms or not.
Will the pendulum eventually swing back to the fairytale type of photos of the '80's and '90's? Only time will tell. One thing is certain, the focus on social photos today is creating valuable historical assets for the future.
Rohn Engh, veteran stock photographer and publisher of "PhotoRESEARCHER Newsletter," has provided on-line targeted information for photobuyers, photo researchers and editors for two decades. No other newsletter brings photobuyers such up-to-the minute, practical information from a professional intimately familiar with both sides of the stock photo desk. For more info: http://www.photosource.com/photobuyer/.
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In the cards for stock photography...
A New Way Of Finding Photos
Captions, captions, captions. In my seminars I used to advise that captions were not necessary, unless your stock photography pertains to scientific, travel, news, documentary, geographic or technical subject matter. The reason? Most editorial photos sold are images that portray a concept: quietude, serenity, speed, force, violence and so on, and the photo editor usually doesn't need to know where all that is happening, or who or what is portrayed. Photobuyers found these editorial pictures by category, at agencies or by direct contact with their list of photographers.
Times have changed. In the stock photography world of the near future, photo editors who need generic commercial stock photos to illustrate a general concept will easily find such photos on a CD-ROM disc, or in a print catalog or its on-line service counterpart.
But if they need a highly specific picture (and the publishing industry is moving rapidly in the direction of using more precise, defined-content photos) they will search out their highly specific needs on the Web - by means of locating captions, or "identifiers," giving brief desriptions of the images.
A NEW NAME FOR CAPTIONS
For example, knowledgeable photo editors nowadays know they can do key word searches on the Web, using search engines such as AltaVista, Lycos, or Yahoo!, to zero in on specific sources for their particular photo need (from lists of text descriptions of photos put on the Web by increasing numbers of photographers).
What we used to call "captions" we can now call identifiers. These are simple words that allow a photo researcher to find your photos. This is how it works: if a publication is doing an article on earthquakes and mentions the 1989 quake that hit San Francisco during baseball's World Series, in the past they would probably have gone with just a photo of Candlestick Park. To find a specific picture of the effect of the quake on the ballpark would have been too time - consuming. Now, the editor just has to enter key words for a search on the Web: Candlestick, Candle Stick, World Series, earthquake, earth quake, baseball, San Francisco. Notice that I intentionally put in different forms of some of the words. The Reason: photo researchers, including foreign buyers, will sometimes misspell their search identifiers. You can anticipate this and enter different forms and spellings to place extensive "identifiers" with each of your photos when you enter them in your Web site directory. It costs no more.
How soon will this kind of photo research come about? Today the system is in its infancy. Photobuyers get swamped with too many responses to searches, for example. They experience mistakes and failures. Those are operational hazards in treasure hunts. But there are "street-smart" photo researchers on the information highway who are using this method today and having success at finding obscure photo needs. Once stock photographers begin to realize the potential of listing their photo identifiers on the Web, more photo researchers will begin to use this powerful research tool.
Improved software will refine search engines to be capable of more precise targeted responses and we'll see software come along that will assist photographers in entering descriptions (text identifiers) of their photo collections onto a Web site. If you have your collection arranged in database form, you are already halfway there. You can transfer it. Next step is to build a Web site and get into the action. -RE
Note: For this article I needed to know the name of the baseball park and the year the earthquake hit. Our nearest library is in Osceola, 12 miles away. Instead, using the Web, I was able to find the details in a matter of minutes using the search engine, AltaVista.
Rohn Engh is director of PhotoSource International and publisher of PhotoStockNotes.
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