The Cart Before the Horse
By Spencer Grant
Ed. Note: Spencer Grant has been a stock photography pro most of his professional life. His writing and photography has been used by major publications-world wide, for the last three decades. In
When I joined my first stock agency 28 years ago and asked what pictures they wanted, I was told “Shoot whatever you want. It’s what you’ll do best.”
The admonition was appealing – then. I was young, idealistic, and vain of my prowess with the camera. I wanted to make magnificent pictures, and I naively assumed that magnificent pictures were the best use of my time. I shot what I wanted to shoot and my stock earnings increased. That first agent became my biggest earner. It all seemed so simple – then.
Recently, I spent half an hour at my new agency. Its target is editorial markets – magazines, book, and textbooks. In going through a group of recent color tear sheets from their photographers, I wound up realizing that for 28 years I’d been the victim of a self-nurtured fallacy – magnificent pictures don’t sell unless they’re also useful pictures. I’d been putting the cart before the horse.
There was the evidence right in front of me. Hundreds of textbook illustrations and not one of them was in my estimation, “magnificent.” No, they had something much more important in common: every one of them illustrated an idea that reflected the accompanying text – simply and clearly.
Photographically, the tear sheets were all over the map. Some had been shot with multiple flash and showed significant photographic skill while others were grainy, often off-color available-light shots. Yet their quality of technique seemed to have no bearing on their success; some of the most technically sloppy shots had been used as full-page “chapter openers,” while some of the most outstanding (to me) had been squeezed down to that lowest rung of editorial illustration: the $67.50 textbook quarter page.
And oh yes – about half the pictures were by one photographer, and that photographer wasn’t me. I walked out of that room very humble indeed.
Within the virtue of hindsight, I see where I went wrong all those years ago: I loved photography for its own sake and shared the fashionable contempt photographers of my generation felt for the “word men” whom we regarded as philistines who had no respect for our commitment. We’d show ‘em!
But did we? Hardly. The word men – and even more, word women – continued to rule the roost and more important, they were right to do so because in the world of commercial communication, photography is a secondary service lagging far behind words, and all our pathetic vanity couldn’t change the natural order. Wiser photographers understood this from the start; the rest of us learned by painful experience.
But it’s unfair to shoulder all the blame. No one’s ever totally right or wrong. Many of my pictures happened to be useful as well as attractive. And some attractive pictures did score…I’ll never forget my half of that $18,500 sale of a straight-up fisheye of the Golden Gate Bridge for an AT&T national ad, or those two $9,000 night scenes of Faro, Portugal’s “Old City.” Atypical experiences like that made me think I was smarter than I really was. They were the exceptions that prove the rule. No stock photographer makes a steady go of $9,000 sales. I only wish we did. Try $67.50.
Also, that first agency – and the many others that followed it – never made a serious effort to improve their directives to photographers. They’re probably still telling photographers to shoot whatever they like, maybe because they don’t know what they want themselves. In any case, after 28 years that agency is no longer my biggest money earner. That distinction goes to my newest agency, where I went from zero to big money in less than two years.
And what makes the difference? Leadership the like of which I haven’t known since the days of Dave Wurzel, my curmudgeonly mentor at United Press International 35 years ago.
When I joined the new agency their only question was whether I was interested in speculative, directed shoots. Sure, I said – and two feet of faxes were waiting by the time I got home.
The photo needs in the faxes were specific, with tight deadlines and notations as to which publisher needed which picture for which book. True, there were no guarantees. The clients didn’t have to use these pictures, but since these were the pictures clients couldn’t find in agency files, the odds favored speculation. We had inside information. We were the agency of last resort.
“Child between 2 and 6 years shopping for shoes, minority a plus,” or “Sick child in bed with thermometer getting to stay home from school,” or “Child looking at goldfish in bowl,” or “Middle-aged parents with infant.” And so it went.
I must have done five hundred of these shoots by now and three things are glaringly apparent: 1.) they sell, 2.) I wouldn’t have thought to shoot any of them on my own. Again, I walked humble in the presence of people who understood what had escaped every other agent I’ve ever had:
1. The stock photo world has changed. In the past quarter-century billions of pictures have been shot and filed. The odds now of scoring consistent sales successes by across-the-board guesswork shooting are slim indeed…I’d guess that 5% is an optimistic figure.
2. A picture agency which fails to take an active role in their photographers’ work will inevitably waste most of those photographers’ time, money, and effort.
3. Given the specific subject needs of many stock agency clients, it’s unreasonable to expect photographers to know those needs without being informed. Some kind of active intermediary is necessary if a photographer’s efforts are going to be productive.
4. Given the passive nature of most stock agencies, very few of them will assume such an active role. They’re content to play by the law of averages, and to a certain extent they’re bound to succeed – out of millions of pictures in the files there’s bound to be some successful sales. Some.
5. My idea of stock photo success isn’t scoring a low percentage of sales form a huge inventory,
OK, I’m lucky. I have an agent who plays the picture market with sophistication and effective leadership. True, they keep me running – as of this writing I’ve done 134 of their speculative assignments since January 1st – but I’d peg their success rate at close to 50%. For that, I’ll run.
What would I do without them? I’d head for the library of my local unified school district and go through a lot of publications: books, magazines, textbooks, marking down the subjects of their illustrations and their frequency. I’d then work up a self-assigned shoot list of the winners and re-shoot them. What got asked for once gets asked for again and again. There's nothing wrong with copying ideas. (Shakespeare did it!) That technique’s open to anyone. The photographer who shot the images you’re copying probably “borrowed”them from someone else, and improved them to bring them up-to-date.
There are places for photographers who want to play the artist, but editorial stock isn’t one of them, because what you photograph is far more important that how you photograph it. When I think of those years when I expected professional photography to reflect my adolescent artistic vanities, I see a bright but unsophisticated little boy who didn’t want to grow up. When I pick up a camera today, I believe I have my ducks in the right row at last: I’m here to illustrate an idea, someone else’s idea. The word men and women still rule, but now we’re colleagues instead of antagonists. That’s what being a professional is all about.
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