The boss of France based stock aerial photo agency HOsiHO Sami Sarkis is calling for action to improve the lives of contributing creatives.
He dropped PAN this call to action:
HOsiHO aerial image bank is calling for action to save the industry’s players
In these difficult times for the creative world, HOsiHO aerial image bank is calling on all its fellow stock image libraries in order to prevent the announced end of an industry severely affected by the health crisis.
A Call to Image Banks
A precarious and alarming situation: the entire artistic creation sector is being hit hard by the containment and by the fall in assignments for all artistic professions.
More than ever, being an independent artist in 2020 has become eminently precarious.
Some have already thrown in the towel, while others are resisting as best they can.
And yet, in a world saturated with images of all kinds, what would we do without those who produce them?
The time has come to act and to provide voluntary responses, otherwise it is to be feared that the entire stock and archive image industry will be condemned in the near future.
A broad movement of solidarity must be set up quickly, so as not to run the risk of seeing more and more authors leave this noble profession following the fatal blow dealt by the global health crisis we are going through.
Paying image creators at their fair value
But the pandemic is not the only cause.
Long before it, the frenzied race to the bottom has dramatically reduced the income of independent photographers and videographers, while the share paid to authors has been constantly cut back over the last ten years or so.
Today, very few image banks pay a fair commission of 50% to their contributors.
30, 20 even 15% have become the standard.
This share is unfair and totally insufficient to allow contributors to make a living from their image production, especially in a context of increasingly low sales prices, often aggravated by almost permanent discounts.
On the eve of Black-Friday, HOsiHO therefore invites all agencies – small, medium and global – to take into consideration the great precariousness of visual creators and suggests to raise the share of rights paid to the artists they represent, and then to increase the price of the photos and videos they sell.
It is a question of equity, balance and survival for the entire profession.
HOsiHO will support its call with a symbolic help, by giving its contributors 80% of the amount of the sales made during the month of December 2020 (instead of the usual 50%). December being, for the agency, one of the best months of the year in terms of sales.
Better income for artists to preserve the future of the industry
« An image bank is nothing without the images that its producers are willing to entrust to it », say Sami Sarkis, HOsiHO’s founder, in the agency’s Manifesto, « I founded HOsiHO agency so that artists can make a decent living from their art and so that buyers can easily find, at a fair price, the aerial, legally shot and high quality images they require. » ( https://www.hosiho.com/en/49-hosiho-is-six-years-old-genesis-and-philosophy-of-the-agency.html )
Obviously, there is an interdependence between creators, buyers and middlemen, all of whom ultimately have the same interest: maintaining a level of income that allows artists to continue to create and agencies to offer new and original images to buyers who are ever more demanding and in search of fresh images.
Thus, «better compensation for image creators means above all ensuring the future of the entire industry. So what are we waiting for? », asks Sami Sarkis, who has been an image maker for 35 years.