David Larsen

For a different perspective on the future of picture agencies, we asked David Larsen, Managing Director of Africa Media Online, to tell us where he thinks his organization is headed.

"At Africa Media Online, we no longer define ourselves as a picture agency.

Rather we are a “digital trade route” providing everything needed to get images from African photographers to global markets – at the right quality and the right time.

Here in Africa, as elsewhere in the world, we have been feeling the impact of three primary innovations that have forced sweeping changes among picture agencies: the advent of digital, the mass interconnectivity provided by the Internet and the emergence of inexpensive “intelligent” cameras that allow amateurs to deliver to markets the kind of quality that only professionals could aspire to in the past.

At one time the picture agency was the interface between photographers or photo collections and the picture-buying markets.

Agencies were the warehouses of the analogue picture supply chain; gathering, cataloguing, researching and supplying images to publishing, art and product markets.

The physical and logistical challenges inherent in this analogue supply route meant that pictures were expensive and picture libraries were specialized and relatively few.

All that has changed. Digital means that on the whole, professional photographers have the potential to handle their own post-production, archiving and research.

The internet means they can deliver to any client in the world almost instantaneously, something only the major wire services could do in the past. Online systems have also meant a proliferation of picture agencies that are cluttering the media landscape.

And the rise of microstock has signaled the arrival of the amateur - on mass. Sourcing, research, payment and delivery can be automated and there have been radical changes to once relatively stable pricing structures.

So where does that leave picture agencies? I believe their future is to redefine themselves to meet the new needs - and there are still needs. Let’s take Africa Media Online as a case in point.

Redefinition as a “digital trade route” has meant we have found there is plenty of scope to service new needs. A great requirement is for the training and coaching of both photographers and picture buyers. With the advent of digital, photographers and designers have both needed to re-orientate themselves in the new world of bits and bytes.

Traditional publishing markets are oversubscribed and budgets are now cut in the wake of microstock. We also find ourselves coaching photographers to take advantage of new opportunities.

While traditional markets are not expanding at the same rate as supply, there are more people buying pictures than ever before. In November 2008, we will be exploring with twenty seven African photo entrepreneurs both the traditional B2B markets and the emerging Many2Many markets (accessed through social networking and other means) as well as coaching in producing work that amateurs can’t.

To senior photographers with significant bodies of work we have found ourselves providing the means to enter the digital world - a high-end digitization service, including keywording on a multilingual thesaurus we developed.

If training and digitization gets “the right cargo on board the ship”, then our online picture library system, called MEMAT, is the ship itself.

We have become a technology-provider creating web sites for photographers, whole photographic agencies and photo archives. We provide the base infrastructure for photographers to present themselves online and to deliver to clients themselves. This caters to the radical individuality of the internet age.

At the same time, the reality of information-overload means that aggregation is often what busy clients want, so we also represent photographers‘ pictures through our aggregated web site, africanpictures.net, providing the sales staff to build personal relationships with clients.

We also maintain a network of agents around the world who represent our collections in various markets. This, then, is the destination of the digital trade route – where the goods are offloaded at a foreign port, ready for sale."