Hi everyone,
I just wanted to say hello with a little intro from me as the new photographers’ rep and let you know that, if you’re one of our photographer members, I’d love to hear from you about anything travel photography related. If you think there’s something the Guild can do better for photographers or how we can better represent you in the industry, please do get in touch with me.
I’ve worked as a travel photographer for most of the last decade and been a Guild member for the last four years. I’ve shot guidebooks for Rough Guides, editorially for Nat Geo Traveller, Travel Africa, TGO Magazine, LoveExploring among others and have done commercial shoots for VisitEngland and its affiliates all over the country. Of course, like everyone, I’m not really doing any of that at the moment.
In recent years, however, I’ve noticed that guidebook publishers no longer commission the photography and instead use more stock photography. There are fewer and fewer printed newsstand magazines and those that do commission photography along with the stories, do it with less frequency than a few years ago and also use more stock from agencies.
This is not to say that stock photography is inherently bad – as many of us have experienced, it’s a good way to earn money from images that would otherwise languish on a dusty hard drive for evermore – but it can lead to a lack of coherence in the storytelling between the words and images on the page.
I looked into this in great depth recently in my MSc thesis on responsible travel publishing and discovered that in some cases a reliance on stock imagery (especially the cheap and free stuff) can lead to different and even contradictory messages being portrayed between both the text and image.
This, in turn, can have quite large impacts on how environmental issues, people and landscapes are portrayed and the subsequent preconceptions they’re laying the foundations for in the viewers’ minds.
There is of course a lot more to be said on the topic and I welcome your thoughts. How can we better represent the places we visit in photo form? What other outlets do you find for your travel photography? How can we, as a Guild, can better represent those of you who reply on photographic work for your income? How many of you have heard the phrase “we don’t pay for pictures” from a publication? Please tell me your experiences.
Thanks so much. Kind regards,
Diana
