How wonderful is Death, Death and his brother Sleep! The Daemon of the World, 1816 – Percy Bysshe Shelley The most surprising thing about Tim Hetherington’s pictures of American soldiers asleep while on action in the Korengal Valley, Afghanistan is the complete absence of stress in their faces. Like children, their dreams appear to be…

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On what we can learn from American culture about photojournalism for the next generation To the generation of the dead the world looks bleak; everything they believed in is washed away and soon forgotten: the struggles, the values and the knowledge that took a lifetime to collect are gone, ignored and often derided. Meanwhile, as…

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On the role of commercial stock imagery in society The most overused and undervalued word in the commercial photo industry is surely “Creative”, most often used to describe anything to do with the origination of photography. According to my dictionary the word is defined as, “having the quality of something created rather than imitated” –…

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Technology has changed the business of gathering news and it’s changing how news is perceived. STEPHEN MAYES considers the opportunities and responsibilities facing news producers and consumers in the digital age. In a dramatic convulsion that has lasted little more than five years photography has been eliminated from the newsroom, replaced by electronic processes that…

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The French have a phrase for it, “Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose” It means that while everything looks different it’s really pretty much the same, and that is how it will be in the stock industry across the next quarter century: there will be dramatic upheaval in how the business is organized…

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The market research is consistent: when asked to identify their top priority when sourcing stock imagery most picture-buyers say the same thing, “it’s all about the right picture”. It seems obvious; after all, that is what the business is about isn’t it, pictures? Stock libraries have focused on the call for quality and relevance and…

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There is a revolution under way at the heart of our culture. Photography, which dominated the Twentieth Century as the most pervasive vehicle for information, has been outed as a fickle and untrustworthy partner of reality. The popular belief in the descriptive power of photography is in question and suddenly everything is changed. The impact…

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