The time of death is approximate.
The body still twitches like a rat in a trap that looks dead but still
jerks when you poke it. And it was an
actual rat (not the rats that ran and destroyed the industry) that got me
thinking about stock photography again.
There was a rat in the sub-basement of my studio. He’d made a little nest, and in the process,
a big mess. Since I was locked-in during
the Coronavirus pandemic I masked-up and risked getting the Hantavirus (a nasty
rodent-borne disease) and went on Rat-Patrol.
And I killed the rat-bastard.
After disposing of the body (in a shallow, unmarked grave) I had to
clean up his mess. He’d made a nest of
pink insulation bits, some twigs, and torn up paper. I guess I’d left him a lot of building
material in the form of paper products; books and catalogs and stuff I saved only
to throw away twenty years later.
While cleaning up the mess I took notice of the paper bits he’d used
to line his nest and it was interesting.
It was like a rat nest-motivated archeological dig into what kind of
print-media rats prefer for building material.
I’d saved a lot of old stock photography print catalogs from the 1980s
and 1990s and he’d used pieces of them to line his nest. For some stupid reason I thought there might
be valuable images in those catalogs. I
had years of catalogs from FPG, Ultrastock, Omni-Photo, Photo Researchers,
Taurus Photos, Nonstock, Uniphoto, Sharpshooters, West Light, SuperStock, Tony
Stone Images, Photonica, The Stock Market, Comstock, Masterfile, The Image Bank
and a whole host of niche agencies. It
was interesting to see which catalogs were chewed and repurposed as rat-mansion
building material. Rat-man ripped nesting-paper
from most of the catalogs but his favorite was the Comstock catalog, it was
shredded! There was one catalog he
didn’t damage and that was the Image Bank catalog which still looked fresh from
the mailbox. He’d chewed bits and pieces
of most all the other catalogs but left Image Bank intact while completely
trashing Comstock. I think that rat
might have been the reincarnation of one of my 1980s stock agency editors! Did Ratman possess a sense of
aesthetics? Perhaps he liked the Pete
Turner photos in the Image Bank catalog so he didn’t eat them? Maybe the abysmally boring Tom Grill photos
from the Comstock catalog put him to sleep in his nest? Has anyone ever done a study on the artistic
inclinations of average Arizona Roof Rat?
I’m beginning to think Rats might make better stock-photo editors than
most of the dweebs in the industry today.
After cleaning up the mess and destroying Ran-man’s mansion of
twig-reinforced stock catalog page bits I took the remnants of the catalogs
into my studio and had a look at their interior pages, twenty-plus years after
I’d ‘archived’ the stuff.
Thumbing through the rat-chewed pages of the catalogs I came to the
realization that I should have thrown them all away long ago. My god we worked hard to produce tens of
thousands of generic pictures for generic clients! I viewed page after page of variations on
dumb themes; hideous stock-photography ‘concepts’ with lab-coated women staring
longingly at test tubes, group photos showing virtually every ethnic group
except extraterrestrials, strategically placed leaves in the foregrounds of
imminently average landscape photos; and don’t get me started on the
color-coordinated hard hat aesthetic of the ‘working man’ portrait! Then there’s the ‘artistic’ pictures, often
in black and white or ‘creatively blurred.’
Stock photography had its own standard cliché’s: ‘winning’ businessmen
running on a track and breaking the tape, road-signs in offices that say
‘stop,’ or ‘one-way,’ or ‘detour.’ Then
there’s the businessman tied up in red tape, and the myriad of lame variations
of the chess piece, grids, glows and smoke.
We’ve got men in mazes, men covered in cobwebs, stopwatches illustrating
‘deadlines,’ and, in all obviousness, the freaking handshake, each one more
‘original’ than the last by virtue of different colored backgrounds. There’s the mini-blind phase of 1992 –please step
away from the goddamn window! The later
catalogs featured pages of the computer keyboard, the floppy disk, the mouse,
the long-exposure zoom effect done to the monitor, and the telephone modem
connector shot with the Spiratone Star Filter.
Interspersed, there were a few actually interesting pictures.
And these were the ‘good old days’ when the pictures were shot by
professionals and were better than the amateur stock photo schlock online
now. Today those pictures aren’t worth
the ones and zeros used to encode them! And…
and… clients paid Real Money for those photos.
You could make a living producing those pictures unlike today when the
average license-fee won’t buy you a cup of coffee!
There was nothing worth saving in any of those catalogs, not even the
ones with my own pictures in them.
I wondered, given that advertising imagery was, in fact, the dominant
art-form of the latter 20th century, if those catalogs had any value
as part of the ‘commercial art historical record’ of the era? So I went to eBay and had a look at ‘picture
books and catalogs.’ I thought that some
of the artsy-fartsy catalogs like Photonica or Nonstock might have some value
but no; there were a few for sale but they weren’t selling. The ‘mainstream’ stock catalogs from agencies
like The Stock Market or SuperStock had no value. The only catalogs that had any value at all
were from The Image Bank. I suspect this
is because of the recognition of the Image Bank brand name and not specifically
the images themselves.
Since The Image Bank catalogs I saved are undamaged and have some
value I think I’ll list them on eBay and see if they’ll sell for a few bucks
(gotta recoup my rat-trap investment). I
could put the Comstock catalog on the top of a pile and donate the rest of them
to ‘Habitat for Rodents,’ but they’ll all be trashed instead.
There are lessons to be learned here and they’re less about rat
behavior and more about photographer behavior.
Stock photos that were outtakes from assignments were vastly superior
than those shot specifically for stock licensing. The assignment photographer was making
imagery with intent. They knew the
client and the story they were hired to tell.
The ‘shot for stock’ photos were all generic images shot for generic
clients and looked ‘dumbed-down.’
Anything remotely conceptual had to be really simple in order for the,
as yet unknown, client to ‘get it.’ Of
course there was no individual photographers’ style present, all the
photographers and their pictures were interchangeable. Stock photography emphasized ‘content’ over ‘artistry.’ Stock photography is just that, stock, as in commonplace
hole-in-the-layout filling content.
Of course it’s all worse today with a market dominated by amateurs
throwing everything at the wall hoping something will stick for six dollars,
before a sixty percent ‘seller’ commission, 120 days after the sale.
It’s amazing how much money was spent on printing and postage in the
pre-internet days. And at least some of
the photos were actually printed –which is certainly more permanent than some
JPEG on the Getty Images website –that is until some rat makes a nest of the
catalog.
May 21, 2020
Week 10 of Cronavirus Pandemic
