I love photography as much as I love illustration. Not surprising as my father is a photographer. When I was a kid I spent many a school holiday holding bits of white/black cardboard.
I guess that’s is why I’d like to spend a bit of time talking about a subject that has been torturing art directors and photographers for the last five to 10 years. In-house v freelance v stock.
Working as a magazine art director the most frequent directive from management is to keep costs down. My budget over the last six years at AFR Boss www.afrboss.com.au has been cut by almost half (to be fair, so has my editor’s) yet I am still expected to produce the same number of pages, with the same amount of photography and illustration in them. The way that I have achieved this is to bring just about all my photography in-house. Luckily for me, the AFR Photographic team are great, so the standard of the magazine has been maintained. However I have lost a bit of my individuality, as all the magazines in the Fairfax business media group also use this team of photographers.
The effect of this on freelancers has been devastating. The already small amount of work that was being commissioned has dwindled to almost nothing. And of course Fairfax P/L is not the only publishing company to go this way.
The freelance photographer is a gutsy breed. Against all career advice they set out to make a living in an already overcrowded field. Some of them invest large amounts of money setting up studios and all of them have to gird their loins and make cold calls to total strangers to try to convince them to commission them for a job. It can sometimes take 10 phone calls and three cancelled appointments before the lofty art director sends down their assistant to see them. I know of one art director who only saw photographers and illustrators on the first Friday morning of the month.
Stock photography agencies have also seriously damaged the chances of freelance photographers getting work.
I was at a barbeque over the weekend and a fellow art director was telling me of a stock photo agency selling one time usage for $5.95. How on earth is a photographer going to compete with that! It is less than a new set of batteries for their camera.
I have to admit I do use stock photography occasionally, but only once or twice an issue and I usually try to skip a few issues. Many magazines at the moment are using all stock, and who can blame them? The deals that are being made by the big agencies with the big publishing houses make financial sense. The trouble is that often the images don’t look Australian and all the magazines begin to look the same.
So, where am I going with all this? I guess I want Australian magazines to use images that reflect our lifestyle. I also want each magazine to have it’s own identity. They should be trying to be more creative, coming up with individual concepts for individual stories and then choosing the right way of realising them, whether it is by commissioning an in-house photographer, a freelancer or with the occasional use of stock images.
I know that it is hard when you have a miniscule budget, but I have often found that if you can get a photographer interested and excited by the project they will be happy to try and work within your budget. For example I had a story based in China just recently. The photographer quoted me a certain amount to shoot six portraits but as I only had about half that amount to spend we compromised and he shot me three really fabulous ones. The story really didn’t need six portraits; it looked great with three. I sometimes think that the trend that has emerged over the last five or six years where we put four, five or more images on a page is overkill. I would always rather see one great shot than a whole lot of dodgy handouts or inappropriate stock images.
Do you agree?
Have a look at the links for some of my favourite freelancers and a couple of useful photography websites.
