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EXPLORING SCIENCE & MEDICAL AGENTS
June 3, 2004
In the SAA newsletter recently photographers Mark Harmel and Peter and Georgina Bowater described their odyssey in trying to find distributors for the science and healthcare images. This article is instructive to all photographers seeking agents and to agents that would like to better understand the concerns and needs of photographers.
By Mark Harmel
In my heart, I'm a generalist. I had a great staff job at a city/lifestyle magazine in Naples, Florida where I shot fashion, food, interiors, birds, swamp buggies and portraits. Being able to express my diversity has always been one of the big attractions to stock photography. After moving to Los Angeles I found that the assignment market placed a premium on specialization. I sold myself as a location lifestyle and portrait shooter.
I discovered that my skill set was a good fit for university publications at both USC and UCLA. Admissions brochures led to nursing magazines. Dentistry magazines led to school of medicine magazines. I slowly evolved to be someone who was comfortable in research labs as well as an operating room. I had a specialty that gave me the access and experience to shoot health and science photos that were in demand by stock agencies.
So far I have only submitted my healthcare images to the general collections at Getty, WorkbookStock, Alamy and TIPS. I have considered specialty agencies in the past, but I have seen them only as good collections of medical illustrations and close-ups of microbes. I was always disappointed with their images of patient care, procedures and research labs.
This subjective quality issue has kept me on the fence about submitting to any of the collections, but I discovered that customers like the expertise and depth of their collections. This report has other viewpoints, but the focus of my research was should I place my images at a specialty agency and if so - where?
Researching the Options
My starting point was the StockArtistAlliance Agency Guide. This is a valuable member resource that collects the comments and experience of SAA members to the major stock portal in the world. This report is limited the Agency reference section (the comments are for members only) to this I include a report from Peter and Georgina Bowater with my own conversations with a couple of agencies as well as photo editors at Time, Business Week and an independent photo researcher.
Here is a list of the contenders:
SAA members Peter & Georgia Bowater have had first-hand experience with many of the portals listed and offer the following observations.
"Our images are enormously varied in subject matter, perhaps too varied, and we are finding it difficult to place a lot of them in the right market. We don't have much pure science but we have a lot of quasi-scientific material, particularly industry and agriculture at the more scientific end of the spectrum. We have images that include geo-thermal power, fancy welding techniques, electronics, plant fertilization, and experimental farms.
On the medical side we are far from specialists and most of our images are more of general medical interest than strictly technical. However, we have sold quite a lot of images in both of the medical and scientific fields.
The first specialist portal we became involved with was Doctor Stock , who approached us. They don't have a great many of our images though we intend to give them more. What they have is largely peripheral. They have produced fairly regular small sales for us. We hope for better, but we're not complaining. While the more hard-nosed business minded photographers might regard it as irrelevant we find DS pleasant, easy to deal with and assume that they are honest. For a proper medical photographer we imagine they could be a good growth agency.
We also have a number of images with Photo Researchers . PR are really a hardcore medical, scientific agency who are in the process of widening their market base and have more general content as well in the hope of pleasing everybody. We have found PR professional, reasonable and straightforward. We quite like them and we think we trust them. We imagine that, if we gave them the scientific imagery in which they specialize, they could do quite well for us. With our more general material they have not done particularly well. In fact, given the amount of our material on their website, they must be running at a loss - and so are we. We will persevere with them but we are astonished at how poorly they have done in comparison with, say, TSM (The Stock Market).
Again, they have probably taken from us material for which they don't have a particularly strong market.
Visuals Unlimited . We approached them and to our astonishment they wanted to take everything we could give them, even the images that had no bearing whatsoever on their scientific specialization. It must be around 18 months since we sent them our first batch of high res finished and keyworded files. We quickly built up that number to about 1200. It must have taken them nearly a year to get anything onto their website and the website is not overwhelmingly impressive. Still no sales. Not a thing. They seem to have been inept at going digital. They were full of confidence at first and then it all fell apart and they became rather evasive and difficult to communicate with. Communication has improved recently and a lot of our images are on their website and a lot of them are quite relevant. Still no sales. Not sure what to make of them.
This might be the moment to mention that much the same material that we have given to the above agencies we have also given to Alamy . In the last 12 months Alamy have made $26,000 from that material - and Alamy is a start up. I don't suppose all the other agencies have made ten percent of that figure. We mention Alamy because we think they have proved that the images are saleable.
We went to Science Photo Library in London. They were very enthusiastic at first but immediately singled out only the material relevant to their specializations. In the end they decided not to take us on as they didn't feel that we had enough of the right sort of material or were sufficiently specialized. In some ways we respect them for that more focused approach but of course we have no idea how they perform for the right sort of photographer.
Oxford Scientific Films nearly drove us mad. We first contacted them about two years ago and sent them a CD of thumbnails. They asked us to wait several months but said that the images were of considerable interest for their new website. They asked us to produce a more refined and categorized selection of the 1500 images then available and asked for them in a particular format. We complied although it was a great deal of work. No response. We chased them a few months later and they wanted some more high res files to judge quality etc. We complied. And then they wanted more high res files and probably foolishly we sent those too. Still no response. And that was about six months ago. We will be writing to tell them to destroy the high res files and forget us. It really is time that photographers became more impatient with agencies who casually burden us with an immense amount of work to no conceivable end.
Also, OSF seem to have thrown their lot in with the sub-sub-agent business and wanted us to agree to let them sell all our images where they liked willy-nilly. We only wanted them to be sold from the main OSF website and they didn't seem to want to comply. This is a good reason for avoiding this agency.
We know that VU have done well for some people and may still do so. PR and Doctor Stock seem worth investing in but not investing too much. We're still looking while our more scientific material is languishing unsold. We get the impression that specialist agencies are needed as The Image Bank never did much with our more abstruse industry and agriculture images. And Alamy, in whom we have great faith, doesn't seem to have developed that sort of clientele yet.
One point that we mentioned but perhaps not strongly enough for our taste, is the matter of sub-agencies. Agencies really shouldn't be distributing material in the way that they are. We like Doctor Stock because they have no sub-agents. We agree with this policy and can not see any use for them. VU did not have any and may still not have any, but they have joined some sort of collective of agencies with a collective website and we don't know what that means, especially as one of those agencies has a bad reputation for paying. PR has sub-agents but one can opt in or out and choose the regions and this seems to be properly managed. OSF seems to be throwing everything to the wolves if they were going to get something back for themselves, however small. We don't like this. Perhaps we misunderstand them but they have not attempted to avoid this approach.
Editor's note: The Bowater's comments were originally penned in December 2003. Their update relating to VU and Alamy follows:
The only additional fact that might, in fairness, be added is that we have
had one or two small sales and a cheque from Visuals Unlimited and their
website now looks better than it used to. Perhaps they were just slow
starters. We are also getting a wider range of sales from Alamy than from
all the rest put together and we think the time will be coming when Alamy
are a good outlet for scientific material. Our growth in income from Alamy
has slowed a little and at the moment hovers around 30,000 dollars gross a
year. Not too bad, but we'd hoped for better. But then, we always hope for better.
Peter & Georgina Bowater comments end here.
Talking to the Buyers
In addition to looking at photographer's impressions of the agencies I wanted to get the viewpoint of the buyer. Over the years I have received requests from Patty Myers, the owner of the picture research firm Bloodhounds. Patty relates that it is "so hard to find good images in the medical field. There is very little that is interesting or imaginative." By the time she gets called into a project, her clients have already been to the larger sites. She will call upon the individual photographers resources she has developed over the years as well as turning to specially collections. She likes Custom Medical Stock for x-rays, germs and bugs and Photo Take for unusual requests. Filling requests for patient images is hard. She reports that the images at Doctor Stock to be "disappointing."
Business Week photo researcher Lori Perbeck will often bundle her science and medical requests with her other general requests at the big agencies. She praised a great researcher at Getty that builds custom light tables for her and uses Corbis, Alamy and the wire services. Her specialty favorites are Photo Take and Photo Researchers.
Christine Scalet, the science and medical photo editor at Time magazine reports that the general stock agencies "don't have what I need," and will turn to specialty collections even though they have higher rates to use the images. She turns first to Photo Researchers. She believes that they are the "strongest collection in both volume and quality." She also praises the customer service that helps her meet deadlines. Scalet will also use Photo Take for her needs, but they have a lower volume in their files.
Moving Forward
Based on my research I have been in touch with both Photo Researchers (PR) and Photo Take (PT) about non-exclusive representation of my images. PR asks for an exclusive contract and PT only asks for exclusivity on catalog and promotional images.
At PR I have been talking with Steve Gerard. Even though he is aware that all of my non-Getty images are with Alamy and selected images are with WorkbookStock.com and TIPS, he is still considering my science and medical images. His colleagues will be reviewing my lifestyle and my landscape and nature images. The basic deal is 50/50 in the US and 30% for sub-agent sales.
Niki Barrie, a free-lance picture editor associated with Photo Take has been recruiting me. Exclusivity is less of an issue with them, but they have not yet filled out the SAA Agency Guide and I haven't seen a contract yet. The basic deal is a US split of 50/50 and 30% for sub-agents.
My journey is not yet complete. Photo Researcher is still in the process of selection images and a contract has not yet been offered. I am giving them the first shot at being a specialty representative of my collection.
Mark Harmel's stock collections can be viewed at
http://www.harmelphoto.com/stock.html