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Stock Photography

From about 1981 to the mid-1990’s, when I was a designer and then an art director at a non-profit government education foundation, there was a time each year when we had to acquire rights to reprint four photos on the cover of a civics textbook. These were not generic. They had to be unique. Two of the current issue photos were of domestic scenes, and two pertained to contemporary foreign issues.

We bought these rights from a "picture agency" across the river from where our office was located. Each year we would make a list for the picture agency (like a menu), and they would bring us slides from their archives (33mm transparencies) from which we could choose. We did this in person. Later on, since we had developed mutual trust, we could have a courier bring us the picture agency’s initial edit (the package of slides).

But the important point was that this was a physical product, in contrast to today’s online image acquisition.

Keep in mind that we didn’t own the photos or even the right to use them however we wished. We had a specific contract to reprint the photos on the cover of this specific book and on a postcard (a marketing product to sell this textbook) that was a single page. The book cover was on one side, and marketing copy and our address plus US Postal Service language (to make this mailable) was on the other.

Moreover, we had a specific number of copies we could send out (60,000 books as educational material, and let’s say 60,000 postcards as marketing collateral). Printing the picture agency’s images on the front cover of the book (rather than inside the textbook) affected the cost of the reprint contract. As I recall, reproducing cover images cost more.

Fortunately, we had in-house photographers for most other photos each year. Even though our content pertained to government education, the nonprofit for which I worked was located across the river from Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, so we could get domestic issue photos from Congress for the interior of this textbook if we needed them and if the staff photographers couldn’t accommodate us.

The Specific License

In this light, it will be useful to know the kind of license we had. It was called a "rights-managed photo reproduction license." It was the most rigorous of photo reproduction licenses, but in return we had the opportunity to reprint photos that most other businesses would not have had in their publications. These might be (depending on the year and the political issues of the time) images from developing nations or war-torn countries or the like. We also had to give very specific attribution in writing next to the photos we reproduced.

Again, remember that these were provided to our organization, and then at press time, provided by us to the printer as slides (i.e., transparencies). These slides were worth a lot. Many of them were originals, not copies. And one year when we had borrowed a number of sleeves of slides for the final photo edit in our office, we had to send back a package of slides worth well over $200,000 (if I recall the number correctly—or at least some such astronomical amount requiring insurance).

That was the period between 1981 and 1991, approximately.

Interestingly enough, as the 1990s passed, we started seeing more generic stock images, printed in books, from other picture agencies that focused on marketing rather than educational content. These images were often available on CDs as well. Later on, when I was the manager of art and production, the photographers who worked for me started getting images online, over the internet.

Having grown accustomed over the prior decade to photographic images rendered with silver halide crystals on acetate (slides), I was wary of the new technology. (I wasn’t convinced yet that scanned images rendered in pixels were of the same high quality as the "grain" of the silver halide to which I had grown accustomed. (In time I got over that.)

This other approach to photo licensing was called "royalty-free" image reproduction. The images cost significantly less to reproduce. And I could (legally) alter them (as Photoshop became available and everything we were doing as graphic artists was moving to the desktop computer. Images were becoming increasingly accessible to our own manipulation, minimizing our reliance on commercial printers for photo adjustment).

But these images, in contrast to the unique images from the original picture agency I described earlier, were not only available to—but also used by--many, many other designers across the country (and possibly across the world). They were royalty free (not actually free) because their reproduction licenses were looser than rights-managed licenses, but a savvy designer had to make more creative use of them so they would stand out from competitors’ use of the same photos.

The government education foundation for which I worked never actually used any of these royalty-free images. However, as a publications department we received a number of free catalogs of these images each year. (These came from several different picture agencies across the United States, which was unusual back then, since we had been accustomed to working with one picture agency across the river in Washington, DC, that had only one office and no catalog.)

The catalogs gave us all (all of the designers) great ideas for designing with photos and text, since these catalogs were specifically produced as marketing tools. But, as I said, we had our own staff of in-house photographers, and other sources, for most work.

In this light I was pleasantly surprised recently when my fiancee showed me one of the books she had found that was just such a catalog from 1998, from a picture agency (or image agency, as some photo repositories called themselves).

Since this time everything has migrated to the internet. And it is now possible to download images of sufficient size (to avoid needing to enlarge them) and at sufficient resolution (300 dpi for print publication or 72 dpi for reproduction on the computer in web pages or ebooks).

How This Pertains to Your Own Design Work

1. Stock photography (produced by other photographers) is a great resource. It gives you reach (around the world) and access to high quality, as well as an additional, creative point of view (or actually many different points of view from many other photographers).

2. That said, stock photo agency photographers need to make money to stay in business. Therefore they are serious about your not using their imagery for free.

3. So pay particular attention to image reproduction rights contracts for these images, whether they are for print publications or for on-line use. These contracts may fall into (at least) two categories (rights managed and royalty free), so familiarize yourselves online with both (and with any newer) categories of contracts.

4. In many cases (at least with rights-managed reproduction) you will need to specify the use (educational, marketing), the press run (for print publication) and the location of the image (cover use vs. use within the text of the publication). You may also need to define your audience or the reach of your publication (the United States, for instance, vs. international exposure).

5. I have met people who have just reused images on their web pages or even included links to publications containing these images. So don’t take risks. Do your due diligence by reading the image reproduction rights contracts carefully, whether you’re designing for print or for the internet.

6. Some picture agencies are even a bit too proactive (understandably, since these are their photos), and they will send you attorney letters, bills, etc., if they find that you are using their unlicensed images online. Just taking them down from the internet will in many cases not be enough to satisfy these attorneys.

7. So the best approach is prudence. Use no image that isn’t yours. Make sure you have the right to alter any images (even if you buy a CD containing "a thousand images for immediate use"), and find out exactly what you need to do to use them. Moreover, make sure you include attribution (add the proper caption noting who took the photos), which is often easy to forget to do in the rush to print your book or upload your website files.

8. That said, don’t rule out stock photography. In the 49 years (so far) of my career in publications and printing, I have depended on both rights-managed and royalty free images many, many times.

[Steven Waxman is a printing consultant. He teaches corporations how to save money buying printing, brokers printing services, and teaches prepress techniques. Steven has been in the printing industry for thirty-three years working as a writer, editor, print buyer, photographer, graphic designer, art director, and production manager.]