Interview With Jim Pickerell
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Jim Pickerell has done it all in Photography, from war correspondent, to stock agency owner to industry analyst and publisher of the highly regarded stock industry newsletter Selling Stock. Jim gives us a thorough rundown on his view of the future of stock and suggestions on how to adapt to the changing industry.
Jim, can you share with us your journey into and through photography, into stock, and finally, establishing yourself as the premier industry analyst and commentator?
In high school I worked in a camera store, sold cameras and photo supplies, and processed customer film using the “dip and dunk” method. I attended Ohio University for two years where I majored in photography. At that point I felt I needed more time to practice what I had learned before I finished my degree. I also knew that I had a selective service military obligation after college, so I joined the Navy as a photographer. After Navy photo school was assigned to the Navy photo lab in Yokuska, Japan. Later, I became a Tokyo based staff photographer for Pacific Stars & Stripes, a military newspaper circulated to all military instillations in the Asia/Pacific region, and traveled all over the area on assignments.
After four years in the Navy, I went to UCLA and three years later received a degree in Political Science. During this period I did lab work for UPI and one summer I served as a National Geographic Magazine intern. The day my UCLA class graduated I was on a plane to Tokyo to begin a career as a freelance editorial photographer.
After a summer in Tokyo where I worked hard, but generated almost no income, I got a one-month temporary assignment from UPI to go to Vietnam and cover for them until they could send a staffer out from New York. When my month was up I decided to stay in Vietnam because living was cheap and it seemed to offer more photographic opportunities than anywhere else in Asia at the time, but even that wasn’t much. This was 1963. There were about 15,000 U.S. advisors in country, no U.S. combat units and for the most part it was pretty quiet. I was the only non-Vietnamese freelance photographer based in Saigon at the time. The other two Western photographers were Horst Fass of AP and the New York photographer who replaced me at UPI. A few other Westerners came in an out from time to time, but no one stayed long.
Three weeks later the Vietnamese military overthrew their president, Ngo Dinh Diem. I was the only photographer in Saigon shooting color that day. Earlier that year Life Magazine had decided that they wanted to try to use a color shot from the major news story in the world each week. I came way from that event with my first pictures in any national magazine and a Life cover.
I covered the war in Vietnam for three-and-a-half years with occasional forays into other parts of Asia. During that period I wrote and illustrated a book called Vietnam In The Mud, which sold out its first printing. In 1968 I returned to New York, still with the vision of a career as an editorial photographer. After 8 or 9 months my wife and I moved to Washington, DC.
In Saigon I was in demand as a war photographer, but New York and Washington had plenty of experienced photographers covering business and politics. I was a nobody I began looking for more commercial work. Short of funds, and with a new daughter, in 1969 I took a staff position with Aviation Week & Space Technology. This was the worst year of my photography career. I liked photographing airplanes and manufacturing, but the magazine didn’t have a travel budget for a photographer and I spent a lot of time sitting around. After a year I went back to freelancing with more of a focus on government and commercial assignment work.
All this time I had been submitting outtakes from assignment shoots to several stock agencies. In fact, the Life cover (November 15, 1963 – http://www.oldlifemagazines.com/mag.php?d=111563) was a stock photo as I was shooting on speculation for Black Star that day. Stock sales became a small, but growing part of my overall income. The 1976 copyright act changed things for stock photographers who now owned their production rather than it being owned by the client who assigned the work. More photographers began to produce stock and customer interest began to grow. I began to spend more time in between commercial and some annual report assignments shooting stock. Stock sales became a steadily growing share of my total photography income.
In the early 1980′s I helped establish the mid-Atlantic chapter of ASMP, served two years as Vice President, two as program chairman, two as President and a member of the National Board. One of the issues that arose while I was a national board member was whether ASMP would publish a new edition of their Stock Photography Handbook and pricing guide. The board decided not to do it, but I felt such a book was needed and decided to publish one independently.
The first edition of Negotiating Stock Photo Prices, which featured charts with recommended prices for all types of rights-managed stock photo uses, was published in 1989. I continued to update the book through the 1990′s and the fifth edition was published in 2001.
In 1990 I began publishing Selling Stock, a subscription based newsletter printed six times a year that dealt with all aspects of the stock photography industry. In 1995 we began delivering the articles online as well as in the printed version and steadily increased the frequency to the point that Julia Dudnik Stern and myself average three stories a day five days a week. At the end of 2006 we gave up the printed edition entirely and went exclusively to online delivery.
In 1993 my daughter and I started a Stock Connection, a general interest rights managed stock agency that gave photographers a 75% share of sales. This was the highest royalty share available at that time. Later we found it necessary to reduce the royalty to 65%, but are still operating on that basis. Today we also represent some royalty-free, but the concentration is still in rights-managed sales. We represent a collection of more than 200,000 images from over 400 photographers.
We are on the verge of launching a new online information service – PhotoLicensingOptions – that will expand beyond stock photography and deal with the business side of photography and every possible way that photographers can earn money from the pictures they produce.
One of the hallmarks of my career is that it has been one of continuous re-invention.
Let’s get down to it; can people still make a living at stock?
NO — with a few exceptions. (1) It may be possible if the photographer lives in Eastern Europe, various parts of Asia or other places where the cost of living is low. (2) If the photographer has very low expectations in terms of living standard. (3) If the photographer already has a large collection of imagery in distribution channels he can probably “make a living” for a while provided he cuts his costs and transitions into some other type of photography that guarantees a fixed fee for work produced. Gross stock revenue will decline. (4) And finally, many photographers will be able to supplement another income source with what they can earn from stock licensing, but they will not be able to support themselves on the income from stock licensing alone.
For photographers living and working in the U.S., I think it will be almost impossible to realize a profit from images produced now and going forward. The demand, even for microstock is leveling out or declining, and there is way too much over supply of every subject matter. The supply of good quality imagery will continue to grow at a much faster rate than it has. Prices will continue to fall. As a result no one will ever be able to earn as much as they earned in the past from stock photographs.
Stock can be a supplement to other sources of income, but not a living.
There is a lot of speculation about “tablets” like the Kindle and the iPad possibly leading the way for more image use and therefore a possible boon to stock photo licensing. Do you have any thoughts on that?
The iPad, in particular, has the potential to become a widely used tool in the field of education. Currently, I believe worldwide licensing of stock photography for educational purposes totals something in the range of 0 million a year, but that figure is more likely to decline than grow as a result of the introduction of the iPad.
A lot of images will be used on iPads, but that doesn’t mean professional photographers will be earning more from licensing rights to still images. For the past five years, at least, book publishers have added something like the following to their requests for rights to use a picture in a printed book.
The requests have included, “the right to publish the picture in an unlimited numbers of electronic uses on the Internet, or in any other electronic product now in existence or yet to be invented, for 10 years from the date of invoice.”
Most image sellers have been agreeing to these terms for little or no additional money. Consequently, the rights for most of those iPad educational uses in the next decade have already been given away. Getty Images has been a leader in this giveaway. Find a rights-managed image on their site and you may reproduce it inside a printed book in any size from postage stamp to double page spread and print an unlimited number of copies, for 7 years for 7. If you also want electronic rights for the same book and time period it is available for an additional 0. If you only want to use the image in an electronic book the price is for 10 years. And because publishers tend to be large users of images Getty offers them much more favorable