It's graduation time. At least, it is at the School of Visual Arts, where I feel fortunate to teach Advanced Digital Photography. During the school year I try to devote at least one session to discussing the business issues seniors will face when and if they venture forth as commercial photographers. Stock photography usually figures in those 90 minutes because it's one of many revenue opportunities in commercial photography. Or at least, it used to be...

Photographers who five years ago made decent livings from stock now tell me that the worm has turned. Five years ago, productive (and subject-savvy) stock shooters could count on a six-figure income. And to be sure, there are a few superstar stock photographers who continue to produce at that level. But the recent wave (tsunami?) of industry consolidation has changed the landscape. More specifically, the channel between the photographer and image buyers has become narrower -- a LOT.

Big Fish Getting Bigger
It's not news that two large players now dominate the stock photography landscape. Between the two of them, Corbis and Getty have swallowed up 45% of the stock photography (and 75% of the Royalty Free) market: Tony Stone Images, Hulton-Deutsch, Bettman Archive, Liaison International, PhotoDisc, Digital Stock, Westlight, Definitive Stock, EyeWire, The Image Bank, Artville, Sygma, The Stock Market, FPG, AllSport, PhotoSpin and a host of others (with more acquisitions to come). Between all the brands under their control, these image behemoths now control the destiny of more than 150,000,000 images.

At this point in the discussion, I ask my students: Among these two collections of some 150 million commercial photos, what remains of the world that has not been photographed? Simply put, Getty and Corbis have many (most?) of the images they need. Okay, not every landscape in the world has been photographed, but hey, smell the coffee: The time is long gone when a shooter can count on his or her skills as a landscape stock photographer to pay the rent.

Five years ago, more agencies than you have fingers on both hands each needed to cover all the same popular visual categories. For stock shooters, that meant ten different collections, each depicting the wide variety of lifestyles, nature, sports, technology, business, etc. that are our commercially interesting visual universe. Those ten collections are now two, and the duplication inherent in the system of five years ago will be eliminated from the new system.

For stock shooters, after getting accepted by a major agency, the next goal was to get images reproduced in the catalogs each major agency published several times a year. The catalogs, of course, carried the photographs to the market -- the image buyers. Five years ago there were ten companies producing several catalogs per year. Today there are two, and the catalog count is likely to go way way down.

Which, for photographers, is still just the beginning of the bad news. Although the catalogs continue to test well in the focus groups, they are incredibly expensive to produce. And while Art Directors can scan a catalog image for a comp, you have to mess around with the scans in Photoshop. Even though you can't carry a disk into a client meeting, downloads are more convenient; it's easier to search for specific photographs with a search engine and thoughtful keywords than it is to page through ten thick photo catalogs, and far more convenient to download a ready-to-use image from the Web site than scan from a catalog.

"So, what about the Web sites?" my students ask?

Surfing for Shooters

At GettyOne, CEO Jonathan Klein has said they plan a ceiling of around 250,000 commercial images. Which might sound like a lot, but not if your Tony Stone images suddenly have to compete with those of the recently-acquired Image Bank shooters and with royalty free PhotoDisc, Artville and EyeWire. Furthermore, GettyOne says that, at most, it will accept 50,000 new images each year. If that represents the annual ouput of their 1,500 photographers, that's 33.33 images per year per photographer. Lotsa luck with the rest of your years' work.

So, it's become much more difficult for established stock shooters to get their images in front of the image buyers -- nevermind aspiring stock shooters. And the bad news for photographers might also spell bad news for our culture, beause so many opportunities for image diversity and variety (based not on market size, but rather, on multiple competing channels to the same picture buyers) are being reduced.

When the digital age of photography was dawning perhaps ten years ago, some in the educational community worried about a split between how reality really looks and reality as depicted in computer retouched photographs. The theory was that a gap -- between the real visual world and the new generation of visually perfect images (courtesy of digital cleanup)-- would lead to more alienation.

While the jury is still out regarding whether or not reality measures up, the last question I asked my students this year was: How many images are enough?

Sam Merrell is a photographer and teacher at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, and contributing editor of both PHOTO DISTRICT NEWS and PIX magazines. Read more about him here.