'News photography is finished'
Gamma, the legendary Paris-based photo agency set up by Raymond Depardon and Gilles Caron, has filed for bankruptcy protection after its owners announced it had lost three million euros in the last six months
A French court has now given Gamma’s owner, Eyedea Presse, six months to try and restructure.
'The business model is not working today,' Olivia Riant, a spokeswoman for Eyedea, told the New York Times in a wide-ranging article canvasing views on the much documented problems facing the photojournalist market. 'So without some changes, it won’t work tomorrow. The problem is that news photography is finished. Gamma wants to go back to magazines and newsmagazines. We will stop covering daily news events to more deeply cover issues.”
Eyedea's chief executive, Stéphane Ledoux, partly blamed French labour law for the decision, which he says makes the country's photo agencies uncompetitive, as freelancers have to be given full-time positions once they have undertaken a certain amount of work.
'We held out as long as we could, but this business model just isn’t viable anymore,' he says. 'They’ve killed French photojournalism by requiring the agencies to make salaried employees of the freelancers.'
Jean-François Leroy, director of the Visa pour l’Image festival of photojournalism in Perpignan, blames the 'disease of the press' for the wider malaise in the industry, and the widespread editorial policy to ditch current affairs in favour of celebrity news.
'Photographers are producing plenty of great stuff, but now the media seem interested only in celebrities,' he told NYT. 'When Michael Jackson died, it wasn’t part of the news, it was the news. How many photographs of his funeral did we really need?”
dfsfs
