Stock photography went through a massive change in the 1980s and 90s, when photos were first digitized and put on the Internet. Stock photography dates all the way back to the 1920s and 30s. Back then, the majority of stock photography agencies were led by photographers themselves; the primary reason being that they were seeking an avenue to make more money with their images. He is widely believed to have created one of the first-ever stock images during a portrait shoot by an airplane.
He asked everyone involved in the shoot to sign model releases, giving him the ability to eventually sell the image. While that does not seem too out of the ordinary nowadays, the practice of turning a photo into a product to sell was a never-before-seen, cutting-edge idea back then. Photography itself was so new that no one had even created a big store or a collection of images they could sell. All of this was until a man named Otto Bettmann entered the picture.
The Bettmann Archive was one of the first collections to be sold, first to the Kraus-Thomson Organization, then to Corbis (a stock photography company founded by Bill Gates), and finally to Getty Images. The contrasts of a changed and changing city convinced her that a comprehensive portrait of New York was very interesting. The newly expanded collection of New York fine prints conveys the degree to which the city is present in the personal histories of many Magnum members, in the photobooks that they have published, and in the archives they have built – in some cases – over many decades. Hartmann, originally from Munich, Germany, moved to New York after serving in the United States Army during World War II.
That, however, was about to change in the 1980s and 90s, when the advent of computers and the Internet changed the stock photography definition forever. But then (at the start of the 21st century), more and more images became available online, and a new type of stock photography agency emerged. The Bettmann Archive was one of the first collections to be sold, first to the Kraus-Thomson Organization, then to Corbis (a stock photography company founded by Bill Gates), and then finally to Getty Images. The main reason photographers continue to engage with stock photography is the sense of community and fun they get from it.
The former’s portraits of New York artists Andy Warhol and Keith Haring continue the lineage of Magum’s members documenting the city’s artists and art-spaces. From a more general viewpoint, however, Changing New York explores how space is rethought and reconfigured in the modern urban environments which have started to emerge around the world. Intensively influenced by the extent and the importance of Atget’s task, she traveled from Paris to New York to find a publisher for his photos. While stock photography has changed significantly in the past 100 years, one thing has remained the same.
