iStockphoto: A designer’s best friend or biggest threat to her job?
Did you see this Time magazine cover, a few months back?
How much would you think the photographer made from that cover shot? Two or three thousand dollars, perhaps?
Robert Lam made 30 bucks, he says.
Time bought the photo via iStockphoto, one of the best sources for cheap art or cover-quality photos.
Lam wrote about it last week in the forums at ModelMayhem. Salon’s King Kaufman wrote about the firestorm that followed (more than 1,000 replies so far, and growing fast):
After various notes of congratulations were posted by other photographers, one of them wrote, “You got screwed,” pointing out that commissioned, as opposed to stock, photographs on Time’s cover are worth thousands. “Photographers are to blame for that $30 option,” the poster wrote.
In response to one poster’s congratulations to Lam for his “accomplishment,” forum moderator Dan Hood wrote, “No the real accomplishment here is that a huge for profit corporation got a cover that should of cost several thousand dollars for peanuts and the photographer is happy about it.”
Granted, Kaufman thinks the photographer made a little more than the $30 the image costs at iStockphoto:
…Because Time prints so many copies, it is likely it had to pay iStockphoto for an unlimited-run license, and that its cost was more like $125 than $30. Still nowhere near thousands, and we should also note that Lam, the photographer, was thrilled with his Time cover at a price of $30, and plenty of his colleagues were thrilled for him.
Perhaps so. But it was Lam himself who cited the $30 paycheck:
This isn’t the first case like this, of course. A few months ago, Wired pointed out that the cute widdle Twitter homepage birdie was also purchased off of iStockphoto:
For less than $15 dollars. Which put a whole six dollars into the pocket of the artist, Wired reported.
The drawing is by Simon Oxley, who has more than 5,000 images available at iStockphoto, including dozens of variations on the Twitterbird theme:
Wired’s Eliot Van Buskirk wrote:
Some designers claim crowdsourcing is evil because it devalues their work by driving down prices, allowing amateurs into the game and forcing people to work “on spec,” meaning that they don’t get paid unless their design is chosen. Others see it as a natural evolution driven by supply, demand and technology.
…”I am not sure [whether crowdsourcing hurts designers],” [Oxley] said via e-mail. “I believe a designer can only be ‘hurt’ when they stand in line — instead of constantly seeking new inspiration and producing new things with their ever-increasing experiences.”
To give Twitter credit, though, they weren’t yet a household name when they bought the art. They hadn’t made a cent. Come to think of it, they still haven’t.
Earlier this month, Oxley told Michael Cavna of the Washington Post:
iStock has clear rules for the usage of images and Twitter has used my bird image as a decorative element on their site — it is not officially the logo, and they do not sell products carrying the image, so they are totally free to carry on using it.
I am, of course, really happy to see it being used by such a successful venture — the question of financial compensation is often raised. I do not harbor any negative feelings about the apparently low fee, [as the situation] being approached by organizations such as Wired.com and The Washington Post has given me exciting opportunities to step into the media spotlight for 15 minutes.
And, we’ll point out, this isn’t a new phenomenon. One of the all-time greatest examples of this sort of thing was this logo, which you may have seen before:
According to a piece published six years ago in USA Today, Nike chairman Phil Knight…
Wrote a $35 check in 1972 to Carolyn Davidson, a Portland State University student, to design the “swoosh” logo. Unimpressed, he said he’d “get used” to the design.
So is iStockphoto — and the other sites like it — a wonderful way to acquire high-quality art and photos on a tight budget? Or is it just another market force, poised to place illustrators, artists and photogs in the unemployment line?
Kaufman concludes:
The same pricing dynamic is in play in journalism. The price is not set by how much time, effort, talent or experience went into making the product, and it’s not set by how much money the customer has. It’s set by supply and demand. The supply of stock photography is very large. The supply of general news content is huge.
If Time hadn’t found Lam’s stock photo of coins in a jar for $30, or $125, it would have found a similar photo for a similar price. If news consumers can’t get their news online for free from their favorite news organization, they’ll find it for free somewhere else.
What happened with Lam’s photo is not a failure of the system, not a case of photographers eating their own and not a matter of big, rich Time magazine taking advantage of the little guy.
Even better: Why buy a photo — even a cheap one — when you can just steal one?
Read more about the mess involving poster artist Shepard Fairey here.
Read the whole of Kaufman’s Salon piece about the Time cover here.
Find the 2003 USA Today article about Nike here. Find the Wired piece about the Twitter bird here and the Washington Post Q&A with the Twitter artist here.
Find photographer Robert Lam’s iStockphoto home here.
Find artist Simon Oxley’s iStockphoto page here.
July 29th, 2009 at 6:45 pm
iStockphoto isn’t a designer’s biggest threat. But I wouldn’t exactly call it his best friend, either. Instead I’d say it’s staff photographers’ and illustrators’ big threat.
Instead of getting a staffer to fill a jar with some coins, write something on a piece of masking tape and slap it on there, the designer browsed a stock photo site, picked an image and did the rest in Photoshop.
Now, this is hardly shocking. I’ve done similar things, but I work at a small newspaper, circulation under 50,000. Sometimes our photographers are too busy, or I don’t come up with a photo illustration idea in time for them to shoot it. What’s shocking is to see this on the cover of Time.
If buying cheap stock photos is causing photographers to be laid off, yeah that’s a bad thing. If on the other hand it’s freeing up the staffers to go out and shoot more stuff, rather than sit in the studio that sounds like a good thing to me. And if it’s cheaper than the big, older stock services, all the better for struggling publications.
July 30th, 2009 at 12:17 am
Hi. I’d just like to clarify that the \Twitter\ bird image by Simon Oxley is still making him money, having sold more than 400 times to date, and the same goes for many stock images. Unlike the parallels drawn between stock imagery and journalism, you can still sell the same stock photo over and over. Despite Wired and other editors knowing that truth, it often ends up left out of stories because it is not as titillating to say that volume sales can make decent income, and for some, six-figure salaries.
July 30th, 2009 at 4:28 am
So basically anyone with 15 bucks can pick up the Twitter bird and put in on their website, thus diluting a visual “trademark” of an alleged multi-million (billion? Hard to keep track these days) Web 2.0 enterprise. That sounds smart.
P.S.: Looks like Twitter has changed the look of it’s main page recently. Oxleys Twitter bird image is gone.
July 30th, 2009 at 6:12 am
Hey Chuck, your Shepard Fairey link takes you to Oxley’s work on iStock.
July 30th, 2009 at 9:10 am
Oops. It was a USA Today story. Fixed it. Thanks, John.
July 30th, 2009 at 1:34 pm
That’s crazy. You’d think at some point they would have just bought exclusive rights to the bird photo.
Note:
If this appears more than once I apologize. Having some trouble posting. Think my connection is buggy at the moment.
July 30th, 2009 at 5:12 pm
I thought the sweetness of the coin jar was that it was a $125 stock pic for a story on frugality. Cheap photo: cheap story. The cover won’t win any awards, but it got the job done.