in 1947, Robert Capa, a veteran of the Spanish Civil
War, and Henri Cartier-Bresson, active in the French
underground, founded Magnum Photos, perhaps the
most famous photographer’s cooperative. Unlike
conventional news bureaus, Magnum was photogra-
pher-run, with a board of directors made up of prac-
ticing photographers. With magnum, the traditional
arrangement of photographers receiving at most 50%
of the amount charged for the photograph, minimal,
if any, royalties, and paying for their own expenses
and equipment began to be challenged.
In the Netherlands, Aart Klein, a veteran of Par-
ticam, established a photo agency of the same name.
While relatively few agencies were established in the
1950s, such as the Swedish group Tiofoto was
founded by Lennart Olson and in Japan, the impor-
tant cooperative agency VIVO, co-founded by
Kikuji Kawada and Eikoh Hosoe, was established
in 1959. These agencies were perhaps more success-
ful in influencing the aesthetic development of pho-
tography in their respective countries than as
commercial concerns. Their model, however, was a
potent one, and many agencies of the 1960s and
1970s, some short-lived, were founded by profes-
sional photographers practicing both reportage and
fine arts photography, who were frustrated with the
status quo. The Vu photographers agency was estab-
lished in France. The Viva Photographers Agency,
which sought social goals beyond straight documen-
tary image-making was founded in 1972, numbering
Martine Franck, later a Magnum photographer, and
Franc ̧ois Hers among its members.
But perhaps the most significant impact photo
agencies had on the social fabric was in Africa. In
countries struggling for independence and those
dealing with post-colonial problems, photo agen-
cies were instrumental in educating the populous,
publicizing injustice, and developing national unity.
One of the most important was the South African
activist photographic collective Afrapix, founded in
- But it was modeled on earlier examples,
including Kenya’s Camerapix agency, founded in
Nairobi in 1969 by Mohammed Amin. These agen-
cies were counterbalanced, so to speak, by official
press agencies like Syli-Photo in Guinea, Congo-
presse in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and
ANIM in Mali, which existed in large part to craft
the public personae of strongmen and dictators who
ran these countries.
In the more traditional model of the photo
agency, Gamma was set up in 1967 by Raymond
Depardon; the Sygma Photo News Agency was
begun in 1973, eventually becoming one of the
world’s largest, and Sipa-Presse, all in Paris. These
agencies worked to codify an equitable method of
payment, more often working on assignment from
the commissioning source, whether a magazine,
industrial concern, or advertising agency, than
doing freelance work that was attempted to be
sold as is to a client. Reproduction fees were gen-
erally negotiated, and photographers kept all copy-
right to their own work.
At the end of the century, there were consolida-
tions and buyouts in the field, especially by the
Microsoft Corporation and Getty Images that saw
the demise of one of the major photo agencies,
Sygma, and legal battles about the use of photo-
graphs in archives and photographers’ rights. The
business practices of Microsoft Corporation’s archive
and licensing company Corbis, which acquired
Sygma in 2000, were called into question. A number
of the agency’s photographers, led by long-time pre-
sident Allen Tannenbaum, left the firm. Many who
remained were fired after staging a strike that closed
down the Paris headquarters. Henri Cartier-Bresson,
at age 93 the senior member of the French photo-
journalistic establishment, wrote that he was
scandalized by the casualness and the cruelty of the
massive firing....The compilation of an image bank, as
well stocked as it might be, will never match the work of
an author. On one side is a machine; on the other is a
living and sensitive being. Corbis offers no choice.
(Columbia Journalism Review,July/August 2002)
The Corbis-Sygma situation brought into focus
the changing business of photojournalism, the his-
torical backbone of photo agencies. The future of
photo agencies, along with stock companies and
photojournalism in general, is likely to be bound
to that of the internet, which has revolutionized the
delivery of visual imagery.
LynneWarren
Seealso: Agitprop; Archives; Black Star; Capa,
Robert; Life Magazine; Look; Magnum Photos; Pro-
paganda; War Photography; Worker PhotographerFurther Reading
Fall, N’gone ́and Pascal Martin Saint Le ́on, eds.Anthology
of African and Indian Ocean Photography. Paris: E ́ditions
Revue Noire, 1998.
Miller, Russell.Magnum: Fifty Years at the Front Line of
History. New York: Grove Press, 1997.
Moments in Time: 50 Years of Associated Press News
Photos. New York: W.H. Smith Publishers, Inc., 1984.
Neubauer, Hendrik.Black Star: 60 Years of Photojournal-
ism. Koln, Germany: Konemann, 1997.PHOTO AGENCIES