Exposure Doesn’t Pay a Photographer’s Bills
A while ago, I received a nice, innocent little letter from someone who claimed to be a student seeking to publish her research on a certain celebrity. She was very excited, telling me that she finally found a small publishing company willing to publish her booklet.
As I happened to have shot some portraits of that celebrity, she was asking me if she could use (free of charge) one of my pictures for the cover. The booklet, she assured me, was totally nonprofit, published only for scientific purposes (scientific?).
As a formality, she also enclosed a release: two pages of perfect legalese clearly prepared by a lawyer. I was asked to sign away my unlimited worldwide rights to my pictures.
This trick reminded me of what happened with a very famous brand. The head of the marketing department wanted to publish my interview in their newsletter. After interviewing me, as a final insignificant formality, he asked me to sign a similar release.
If they ask you to sign the rights of your pictures away for free with similar subterfuges, please be very mindful and don’t fall for it. I know that these requests have become almost ordinary now, but photographers need to be paid for their work.
Magazines are selling copies and also selling advertising on their pages because they have interesting pictures and texts. Content makes a magazine valuable. That content is essential for their business, without it they could not make any money. That content MUST be paid for. Period.
Advertising agencies use pictures to sell products. Those pictures are essential to attract clients. Those pictures MUST be paid for.
If you are an amateur photographer, that’s not a reason to mess up the market for the professionals. Please don’t give your pictures away without compensation.
As digital democratization spread, anyone with a digital camera (or even a mobile phone) could convert life into pixels and call themselves a photographer. As a consequence, the number of wannabes willing to give away their photos for free exploded. No wonder magazines are getting used to offering publicity and exposure instead of real money. This attitude is killing photojournalism. I can never say it enough that work needs to be paid for. And when one of my students says to me, all excited, that maybe such-and-such magazine will publish his/her pictures, the first thing I ask is “Did you negotiate a price?”
Clients that would like to use my pictures for free, or those who are only willing to pay peanuts because I will get “excellent exposure”, really wore me out. In order not to waste time explaining each time why professional photographers cannot work for free, one day I decided to create a short cartoon that illustrates the facts with a bit of humor (it always helps!). It’s a dialog between two bears representing photographer and client. I posted the cartoon on YouTube, the title is Exposure Doesn’t Pay Bills. To all those “clients” that are asking me to work for free, I am now sending a simple link to the video. Feel free to use parts of the following text to answer weird requests or use this cartoon to educate your clients.
About The Author:
Currently based in Milan, Enzo Dal Verme is a portrait photographer that has been working in the photography industry for over 15 years. His work has been published in Vanity Fair, l’Uomo Vogue, Marie Claire, Panorama, Glamour, The Times, Grazia, Madame Figaro, Elle and many other magazines. He recently published in the States the book Storytelling for Photojournalists.
Enzo also teaches at the Portrait Photography Retreats and at the Workshop Ritratto and has over 15 years of experience facilitating groups.
Follow Enzo on Twitter and on Medium.
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