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other
photo agencies
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This
profile considers the Corbis image library.
It covers -
introduction
Corbis,
Bill Gates' private company, owns a major collection of
images. It has been active in licensing use of those images
by businesses, other organisations and individuals. It
has also become an agent for images owned by other entities,
notably major art museums in North America and the EU.
As of early 2005 Corbis claims to have upwards of 12%
of the global image library
market, behind the 30% share enjoyed by competitor Getty
Images.
activity
Corbis's
activity essentially involves
-
ownership of archival image libraries, including photographic
prints and non-photographic material
- several
major image licensing agencies dealing with archival
and contemporary images, for example the Roger Richman
Agency which arranges licensing deals for several deceased
celebrities
- a
retail operation aimed at consumers, supplying collectibles
(eg prints and posters) and electronic images
history
In
competition with Mark Getty, Gates
has been buying image libraries over the past decade.
Purchase of the libraries gave Corbis ownership of photographic
prints and sometimes also gave it ownership of copyright
in those works.
The collection now includes
- the
Bettmann archive of around 7 million photographs
- the
United Press International (UPI)
collection of around 10 million photos from the Hearst,
Scripps and Chicago Tribune
newspapers
- around
30 million images in the collection of Corbis' Sygma
photo agency subsidiary and Saba Press' million news
photographs.
It
also includes non-photographic material.
The overall holdings are believed to amount to around
65 million items, ranging from gems by master photographs
to sheer junk, daguerrotypes to contemporary snaps.
Corbis licenses digital reproductions of prints, paintings
and drawings in the collections of St Petersburg's Hermitage,
the National Gallery in London, the Philadelphia Museum
and other institutions.
It
is unclear whether Corbis is profit-driven, a rich man's
toy or just hedging bets after the multimedia disappointments
recounted in Fred Moody's I Sing The Body Electronic
(New York: Viking 1995). There have been suggestions that
its owner has been disappointed by slow sales growth and
higher than expected expenditure, along with criticism
of 'content imperialism'.
In 2001 Corbis announced that it would scale back expansion
plans and shed many of its 1,300 staff as part of moves
to
increase
its focus on customer-related activities, accelerate
the integration of its numerous acquisitions and increase
productivity ... to create a profitable, all-digital
business model
Digitisation
of the collection, some of which is deteriorating, was
also cut. Although reports vary, it appears that while
Corbis has around 2 million digital images, less than
1% of the Bettmann collection has been digitised and that
much of the information about its contents is still in
paper formats, including handwritten notebooks and index
cards.
The lack of a comprehensive electronic database is not
too surprising - Corbis is like many cultural institutions
with collections that accumulated over a hundred years
- but does mean that restrictions on physical access to
the images may be a problem. Many will be frozen 70 metres
underground.
In 2001 Corbis acquired the Second
Line Search clearance agency, with plans to launch
an online clearance service by mid 2003.
In 2005 it paid US$96 million for German image library
and licensing group Zefa, at that time the third largest
global image group (behind Getty and Corbis). Corbis'
revenue in 2004 was around US$170 million; Zefa had revenue
of around US$41 million in that year. Zefa is based in
Düsseldorf, with a sales office in Hamburg and 16
subsidiaries and partner agencies around the world concerned
with rights-managed and royalty-free collections.
Bettmann and Kraus
In
an ironic way the collections at the heart of Corbis are
a gift from Hitler, along with the extraordinary scholarship
that fled Hitler (and the indifference of much of Europe)
in the 1930s and 1940s.
Kraus-Thomson had been founded by Hans Peter Kraus (d1988),
one of the dominant rare book and manuscript dealers from
the 1940s through 1980s. Kraus launched an antiquarian
bookshop in Vienna in 1932; after seizure of his assets
by the SS in 1938 he was held in a concentration camp.
On release he managed to move to New York, opening a new
shop in 1939. He subsequently expanding into microfilm
and specialist book publishing, along with establishment
of a major archive. He acquired the Bettmann Archive in
1981, followed by the United Press International collection
(United Press International, International News Photos,
Acme Newspictures and Pacific & Atlantic photos) in
1984. Corbis acquired the Bettmann Archive and UPI collection
in 1995.
studies
There has been no major study of Corbis and treatment
in biographies of Gates or works on Microsoft is essentially
anecdotal.
For Kraus see his frenetic autobiography A Rare Book
Saga (New York: Putnam 1978). For context see The
Muses Flee Hitler: cultural transfer and adaptation, 1930-1945
(Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press 1983) edited
by Jarrell Jackman & Carla Borden.
landmarks
This
chronology is indicative only.
Context is provided by the broader communications and
media timeline and highlights
of the photo agency
industry.
1973 Sygma news photo agency founded
1989 Corbis founded by Bill Gates of Microsoft
1995 Corbis buys Bettmann Archive
1999 Corbis buys Sygma
2000 Corbis buys Stock Market photo collection
2000 Corbis buys TempSpot sports image collection
2002 Corbis buys Sekani moving image collection
2005 buys Zefa for US$96m
2005 buys The Roger Richman Agency ("iconic personalities")
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